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Bike SMS: use this text tool to find nearest Citi Bike sharing station

This University of Pennsylvania student, who visits his smartphone-less girlfriend in NYC often, built an SMS based Citibike pod status checking system.

New Citibikes, right after ridesharing debuted Photo by Brady Dale

University of Pennsylvania student, Joel Goldman comes to New York almost every weekend to visit his girlfriend, and they both use Citibike. When he’s not here, though, his girlfriend, who hasn’t made the smartphone transition, has no access to the Citibike app to figure out where she can go to find the nearest pod.

So Goldman created Bike SMS, a free service that will tell you where the nearest pod is if you just text it your address.

Text the address to 516-204-4668 and you’ll get  a response right away.

Enter your number at the Bike SMS website, and it will text you instructions on how the service works.

The Sunset Park based NYC Bike Share, which operates Citibike, has not developed a text based service that we know of. Their smartphone app is good, but could be better.

If you text Bike SMS “From ADDRESS to ADDRESS” it will text you back the nearest pods and number of available bikes near your origin and the pods near your destination and how many docks each have open.

It feels a little old school, but in some ways it’s faster than the smartphone app. SMS is more reliable than mobile Internet connections. Plus, the Citibike app doesn’t let you search for directions between locations or for anything but pods. So sometimes you are bouncing between two maps on your phone to figure out what you’re doing.

It will also be interesting if this can be a valuable accessibility tool, as more than 90 percent of American adults have some kind of mobile phone, but still just half have smartphones.

Companies: Citi Bike
Series: Brooklyn
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