This Art Project Slows Down Citi Bikes to Make NYC’s Rent Crisis Feel Real

Justin Blinder lost his job two weeks before the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020. To pay his rent, he turned to delivery services, riding his bicycle across New York City to deliver food. As he went, he noticed the disparities in where the food items went. Which order of Nomé sushi went where and how much people tipped.

“The city started to feel much more economically and psychologically disparate,” Blinder tells WIRED. “It really changed so much on a block-by-block level. These inequalities and demographic differences were happening in such close proximity.”

That experience has morphed into an art-project gadget called Ground Truth that Blinder hopes will raise awareness about the housing affordability crisis in New York City and beyond by making a Citi Bike—one of the ever-present ebike rental options across the city—harder to ride through places where it’s harder to live.

Blinder, a Brooklyn artist and contractor at Meta, received a $10,000 grant for the project from a Brooklyn arts organization called Idle Hands.

Ground Truth is a box that will trigger the brakes on the Lyft-owned bicycle, adding more resistance to the pedals when riding through rent-burdened neighborhoods, where people living in those areas spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent. Ride past an economically well-off block, and the bike is easier to pedal. Going past a block where rent takes the bulk of the households’ incomes can slow the bike down to a crawl.

There are two versions, one that can work on a regular bicycle and one built specifically for Citi Bikes.

The box mounts on the bike’s fork and is then attached to the front brake line. A battery-powered GPS component tracks the bike’s location. As it moves, the location is cross-referenced with household economic data from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, stored on the device. When the bike passes a block the dataset says has a higher percentage of rent insecurity, the microcontroller triggers a small motor that applies the brake to add resistance, and the bike gets physically harder to pedal.