Ben Fried started as a Streetsblog reporter in 2008 and led the site as editor-in-chief from 2010 to 2018. He lives in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, with his wife.
Ben Fried
Recent Posts
Caption Contest: Anthony Weiner on a Citi Bike
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I don’t care if this is a carefully choreographed photo op. For one day, at least, we’re not going to run a picture of the Weinermobile in a post about Anthony Weiner. We’re just going to link back to the most recent post with a Weinermobile picture. And we’re going to turn this into a […]
Citi Bike Has Already Surpassed 10,000 Trips Per Day
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Bike-share users made 10,099 trips, and annual membership continued to surge in the third full 24-hour period of usage stats that Citi Bike is reporting. Usage between 5 p.m. Wednesday and 5 p.m. Thursday topped 10,000 trips, an increase of about 33 percent over the previous 24 hours. Meanwhile, an additional 2,449 annual subscribers joined […]
Support Pro-Human Transportation Journalism – Give to Streetsblog
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We are rolling right along with our spring pledge drive. Thanks to everyone who has contributed so far — your donations will be converted into Streetsblog posts making the case for more livable streets and Streetfilms videos showing success stories and ideas from cities around the world. But we need more readers to step up […]
Citi Bike Hits 7,500 Trips on Day Three
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Citi Bike has been compiling daily stats on usage and membership on its blog, and in the 24 hours between 5 p.m. Tuesday and 5 p.m. Wednesday, users logged 7,500 trips on the bike-share system. The number of annual members increased by nearly 2,000 over the same period, bringing the total to 21,300. Joe Cutrufo […]
Citi Bike Membership Surges Past 20,000 — Smell the Desperation at the Post
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That acrid scent wafting from the News Corp. Building is flop sweat pouring off Col Allan and the New York Post editors as they watch tens of thousands of New Yorkers start using the city’s new bike-share system. As of this morning, 20,000 people had purchased annual Citi Bike memberships, an increase of more than […]
Bike Habitat’s Charlie McCorkell: Citi Bike No Threat to NYC Bike Shops
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Charlie McCorkell is a pioneering NYC bike advocate and the owner of one of the city’s most successful bike shops, Bicycle Habitat. His flagship store is on Lafayette Street, just north of Spring, which is right in the middle of the Citi Bike service area. After observing the first day of NYC bike-share from the store, […]
Bloomberg Was on Fire at Yesterday’s Bike-Share Presser
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Yesterday’s Citi Bike announcement was maybe the last occasion to see Michael Bloomberg answer a whole string of bike-related questions from the NYC press corps in one sitting. The mayor has a reputation for jousting with reporters at these events, sometimes more crankily than others. Yesterday he was combative but clearly enjoying himself. He had […]
New York City Sets in Motion America’s Largest Bike-Share System
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Five years ago, the New York City Department of Transportation signaled its interest in creating an extensive bike-share system “to accommodate a wide range of potential short trips.” Now New Yorkers have that system at their fingertips. With today’s launch of Citi Bike, there’s a new travel option in the mix — 6,000 bikes at 330 […]
Bike-Share Goes Live at 11 – Don’t Forget to Activate Your Key
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Good morning on this momentous Monday. Shortly, workers with NYC Bike Share are going to turn on 330 or so public bike stations, giving New Yorkers access to a new transit network. At around 11 a.m., those stations should all be ready to release bikes to the 13,000 some-odd annual Citi Bike members who registered by […]
After Bike-Share Launches and the Dust Settles, Remember the NIMBY Frenzy
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Last week, Columbia University professor David King ran a great response to the recent grousing about bike-share stations. He posted this graph depicting how public perceptions of congestion pricing programs change over time. An outfit called CURACAO (one of the weirdest, most tortured acronyms of all time — it’s short for “coordination of urban road-user […]
Mesmerizing! Citi Bikes Arrive
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Here it is: A bike-share station with bikes, and it’s not a photo shoot. A reader sent this shot of Foley Square across from the courts this morning. Update: More than 850 of the 6,000 bikes are in the stations as of this morning, according to NYC DOT. The blue bikes are a great conversation […]
Anthony Weiner: I Love Bike Lanes. Let Me Count the Exceptions…
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Anthony Weiner, enemy of congestion pricing and infamous bike lane antagonist, is talking about street design on the campaign trail. Though there was plenty of warning this day would come, it’s still kind of surreal. Weiner told Capital New York’s Azi Paybarah he was just joking when he boasted to Michael Bloomberg and a room […]