The Great "Fake" Citibike Getaway
A high-profile shooting and misinformation in the midst of an ongoing e-bike micromobility debate.
Yesterday Wednesday morning, the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot in Midtown Manhattan. A gunman shot him outside of a Hilton Hotel where he was attending a UnitedHealthcare investors conference. As of writing, there is no clear motive as to why he shot the CEO, with bullet casings found at the scene holding the words “deny”, “defend”, and “depose”.
Police reported that the suspect fled the scene on a bike. Immediately, the search to find the suspect led a number of people to start scouring surveillance cameras to see if they could identify who the man was, the bike he was on, and where he went. Uncovered footage saw a suspect carrying an e-bike battery, which after a tweet by @rtwlz, seemed to pin the attacker to fleeing the scene on an electric Citibike.
The idea of a someone running to a Citibike terminal, pulling up the app, scanning the QR code, waiting the several seconds to see a green light and “ding” go off unlocking the bike, backing up into the nearby bike lane, and then speeding off — all the while holding onto their gun after having just shot someone — is such a bizarre image in my brain. For all we know, he probably had to scan multiple Citibike’s because of how inconsistent the bikes are at showing whether or not they are available to be checked out.
The rest of the thread showcases @rtwlz’s table of scraped Citibike data, which he doesn’t fully explain how is done. With some help from
asking around, I wrote a quick blurb below for how you can also scrape Citibike data whether it be to track down a shooter or your friends showing up 30 minutes late to a dinner because they were searching for a bike.Okay, but did the shooter actually getaway with a Citibike?
Almost immediately, the Citibike claim proved to be false. This became apparent once an image of the suspect fleeing the scene very clearly was not riding a Citibike. Even if it had been one of the newer thinner and white ones, the image definitely does not look like a Citibike.
A few hours later, NBC News (@Tom_Winter, @BenjaminGoggin) confirmed with a representative from Lyft, who manages and operates Citibike, that NYPD shared with them that a electric Citibike was also not used.
This is still an ongoing investigation as images of the suspect’s face are released by police, but one thing is for certain — clearly the story that someone did a “drive-by” with a Citibike was too good of a story to be true.
Update: Appears to be the suspect is Luigi Mangione.
Quick Sidenote about Electric Bikes in NYC
While we’re on the topic of electric bikes, they are currently being challenged by New York City Council with a new bill, Intro 606, requiring NYC Department of Transportation to license all e-bikes, regardless of classification. This includes electric Citibikes.
Besides the fact that multiple analysis from other cities like LA and Houston have proven the economic failure of running a program at this scale, licensing biking behavior does not actually increase safety. All this bill does is allow for police to stop any e-cyclist to “inspect their license,” which we know is really code for stopping food delivery drivers, or immigrants and people of color, the majority of e-bike users.
This bill is just a new iteration of stop and frisk, something New York City has fought long and hard to get rid of. The recent legality of jaywalking also tries to combat this immoral behavior as the vast majority of random jaywalking stops made by police were of people of color for instances rarely related to jaywalking.
Safety around bicycling is sorely needed, especially around delivery bike riders, but it does not come about through licensing bikes. Rather it comes through more biking infrastructure, increased education, and improvements in battery safety — many things I’ve previously written about here.
A livable city for the pedestrian experience requires smarter, strategic forward-looking policies; not something that punishes the wrong people. For those that have time, join me in speaking up on December 11 against these proposed e-bike restrictions.
Okay now here’s how to scrape Citibike data.
Scraping Citibike Data
For anyone that has used Citibike, you probably know about the Citibike or Lfy app. All of the available open bikes and open parking spots are publicly available so anyone can find where available bikes are. There’s also a webapp you can use to find bikes. @oobr. created a cool version tracking an almost heatmap version of bike usage and availability across the city (and other cities).
Lyft publishes real time data in General Bikeshare Feed Specification (GBFS) format in addition to easily accessible monthly history data.
To access real time data, you can use the public api endpoint https://gbfs.lyft.com/gbfs/2.3/bkn/en/station_status.json to get station level information like station ids, bike availability, dock availability.
But to do something like what @rtwlz did above, you’ll need to have access to a bearer token to unlock more sensitive information, as you are obviously tracking specific bikes and where they leave and dock. If you are able to find a bearer token by intercepting a packet sent by the app or webapp and access it through the aforementioned api endpoint, you should be able to pull more specific station ID info under motivate_REGION_STATION-ID. This will get you the bike IDs under rideable_name to then mark out timestamps at different stations. From there, you can match this info to figure out when and where bikes are entering and leaving.
Shoutout to @tensorbodega for the help, and check out more from his quick post here.
One last tweet that’s pretty funny:
