A 16-year-old boy riding a Citi Bike was killed by a hit-and-run driver in Queens on Monday night, becoming the third person to die so far this year while using the bike-share service.
Police said the teen, Jaydan McLaurin, was riding an electric Citi Bike north on 21st Street at the intersection of 21st Avenue in Astoria around 9:30 p.m. when he was struck by a man driving a 2022 BMW X7 heading in the opposite direction.
The driver fled the scene, and police later arrested 18-year-old Farmingdale resident Yaser Ibrahim, according to the NYPD. Ibrahim was charged with driving without a license, leaving the scene of a fatal crash and operating a car with a tinted windshield, police said.
Attorney information for Ibrahim was not immediately available.
McLaurin was taken to NYC Health & Hospitals Harlem, where he was pronounced dead. He was the third Citi Bike rider fatally struck in 2023, and the second to die this year while riding an e-bike rented from the company.
Tamara Chuchi Kao, 62, was killed by a cement truck driver in Astoria while riding an analog Citi Bike in January, according to police. Days later, Sarah Schick, a 37-year-old mother of two, was killed by a box truck driver while on an electric Citi Bike in Gowanus, Brooklyn.
Next month marks a decade since Citi Bike’s launch in New York, which began with docks in Manhattan south of 79th Street and in parts of western Brooklyn. The network has since expanded into farther reaches of Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx. Its ridership has also grown drastically. The system clocked a record 135,005 trips in a single day last September. A spokesperson for Lyft, which owns Citi Bike, said the system’s ridership is up 36% this year from the same point in 2022.
The first Citi Bike death came in June 2017, four years after the network launched, when 36-year-old Dan Hanegby was killed by a charter bus driver in Chelsea.
There was a string of injuries among Citi Bike riders on the network’s e-bikes in 2019, the year the…
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