I am curious if anyone has information about Citibike's projected operating expenses and revenue, and what sort of ridership it needs to reach to be financially viable?
I know the system is advertised as being entirely privately funded, that Citigroup is a $41MM for 5 years sponsor and Mastercard at $6.5MM for ? years sponsor. We can all look at the Citibike blog and see how many memberships and passes they have sold. I'm coming up with about $3.8MM in annual memberships sold so far, 24-hour and 7-day passes being sold at the rate of about $0.6MM/month, so I figure that Citibike will have rider revenue of at least $7.8MM a year. Is that rider revenue, plus the annual sponsorship revenue, enough to keep the system going?
I read somewhere that Citibike employs 200 locally. I imagine those are mostly bike mechanics and rebalancers.