Art project makes NYC Citi Bikes physically harder to pedal in rent-burdened neighborhoods

Artist Justin Blinder aims to make the burden of high rent palpable with a new device called Ground Truth — a gadget that can be attached to any bicycle to cause it to slow down through rent-burdened neighborhoods, making them physically harder to move through. 

Blinder, a Brooklyn artist and contractor at Meta, built the gadget to cross reference location information with household economic data from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which is stored on the device, reports Wired. He attached the device to NYC Citi Bikes for a video project (no, he didn't slow down publicly-used Citi Bikes) and rode them through the city to illustrate the physical manifestation of the disparity. 

"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... 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," Wired reports. 

Blinder also hopes the project will also call attention to the rising cost of renting a Citi Bike, which has raised its prices for the past five years in a row. 

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