Man Rides Bike Share 2,900 Miles Across Country, Charged $1,200

Billie Cohen
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Jeffrey arrived in Claremont, California yesterday and posed at the Claremont Colleges. He has only a short trip left to his final destination of Santa Monica. (Photo: Jeffrey Tanenhaus/Instagram)

New York City’s CitiBike bike-sharing program is intended as a way to promote green commuting. You rent a bike for 30 minutes at a time and can pick it up and park it at any of the hundreds of docks around the city. Jeffrey Tanenhaus had a different intention.

This 35-year-old picked up a bike one day and rode off on a cross-country trip — from Brooklyn to Santa Monica, California.

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As Tanenhaus tells The Guardian, he had become frustrated with the work-sleep-work-sleep-work cycle he was stuck in, and finally decided to make a drastic move: He left his career and his apartment and after spending some time doing odd jobs to make money, rented a CitiBike from a docking station in lower Manhattan and kept on riding.

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As he wrote on Instagram, “Joshua Tree + Jeffrey tree = happy forest”. (Photo: Jeffrey Tanenhaus/Instagram)

So far, Tanenhaus has logged 2,945 miles and found freedom, new friends, and exhilaration on the road, all of which you can follow on his lively Instagram feed (@countribike). He also found a $1,200 overage fee from CitiBike. True, he could’ve bought his own bicycle for that amount of money, but it turns out that Tanenhaus has a thing for CitiBike. He used to ride one to work every morning and told The Guardian it was the best part of his day…not so surprising really when you find out that he’s also biked solo down Bolivia’s Death Highway and has intrepidly traveled to Colombia and Myanmar. A two-wheeled jaunt across the country seems right in line with his adventurous spirit.

Or was this just another grab for Internet fame? “It’s not a publicity stunt,” Tanenhaus assured The Guardian. “There are far easier ways to get publicity that don’t involve five months on a giant blue bike.” That’s certainly true…and most of them come without a $1,200 fine.

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