A Capital Bikeshare Bike Angels strategy guide for beginners

It took me a few years of having a Capital Bikeshare membership to realize that I could zero out the cost of an annual membership by using CaBi to replace enough Metro trips. I needed much longer to realize that I could outright make money off the D.C. area’s growing bikeshare system.

That’s thanks to CaBi’s Bike Angels program, which offers a menu of rewards to riders for picking up bikes from docks with too few open slots and dropping them off at docks with too few bikes. The two kinds of rewards worth pursuing: e-bike credits to offset the 10 cents/min. cost of having an electric motor whir you along, and a choice of e-gift cards that require higher point totals.

In less than a year after I started seriously taking advantage of the program that I had joined in 2018 and then ignored, I’ve now racked up more than $200 in rewards value–far exceeding the $95 annual cost of my membership.

The first flavor of rewards is the easiest to claim: Just 10 points will get you $1 in e-bike credit, but you might as well hold off until you reach 80 and can convert that to $10 in credit that covers more than an hour and a half of free e-bike transportation.

The e-gift card rewards start at 100 points for a $10 e-gift card, but racking up 1,000 earns a $150 card. The redemption options on the one I earned in March, listed in a link in an e-mail sent 17 days after I redeemed those points: Amazon, Airbnb, Disney, DoorDash, REI, or Walmart.

That link also offered a choice of nonprofits to reward instead, some new to me: Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the Dystonia Medical Research Foundation, Everytown for Gun Safety, the First Nations Development Institution, Habitat for Humanity, LatinoJustice PRLDEF, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, or the Trevor Project.

With either rewards option, the maximum value you can get out of a Bike Angel membership is 15 cents per point. The worst you can do is redeem 20 points to extend your membership by a week, under $1.83 in value.

(These redemption ceilings date to sometime early this year, when the program stopped offering a $200 e-gift card for 1,000 points and a $50 card for $300 points–which last year I got paid out to my PayPal account. Like an airline or hotel loyalty program, Bike Angels can inflict devaluations with no notice.)

Now that you know what you can get out of Bike Angels after joining this program in the app, here’s how you can go about putting a little effort into it:

1. Always check the CaBi mobile app not just before going somewhere via bikeshare, but if you were also going to walk. Check again just before you undock a bike, because point values change often.
2. Never take just one points-earning ride in a 24-hour period if you can help it, because that positive ride will double your points for the next 24 hours. After three more positive rides in 24 hours, you unlock triple earning.
3. The most valuable rides start at a station that needs pickups, shown in the app with a black icon for the points value, and end at one that needs dropoffs, shown in white. You’re not crazy to go out of your way to squeeze in a ride for this reason alone, especially if you’ve already activated a points multiplier.
4. Don’t be a jerk: If the closest dock to you only has one or two bikes left and you don’t have a non-points reason to take a ride from there, keep walking.
5. Sometimes it’s not worth trying to game the system. You want to bikeshare into downtown D.C. in the morning like everybody else? Not only may you not get any points out of the ride, you can easily reset your streak by having to return a bike at a dock that needs pick-ups.
6. If you don’t have an annual membership, ignore most of this advice because the $1 fee to start a ride and the subsequent 5 cents/min. charge for a regular bike will wipe out whatever value you could hope to earn in points. If a ride that you were going to take anyway offers points, consider that a tiny bonus.

Bike Angels also offers lifetime-achievement status like what you can achieve in an airline’s frequent-flyer program. Racking up 250 points earns “Joy Rider” status, plus a pin you can stick on your messenger bag and an extension of the 45-minute free-ride period you get with a membership to 60 minutes. The 500-point Casual Cruiser level gets you another pin and a large water bottle with the Bike Angel logo; they sent me two of those bottles by mistake. By reaching 1,500 points, I now have a fancy CaBi key fob and a third pin on the way, and I look forward to getting some CaBi-branded bike gloves and yet another pin at the 2,500-point mark sometime later this year.

At that point, I should probably ease off on this low-paying side hustle. But like Chris Person, the New York video-game journalist whose strategy guide to NYC’s CitiBike inspired this post, I guess I’m a sucker for a well-designed gamification scheme.