Each day the weather cooperates, 58-year-old Richard Dennis takes the PATH train into Manhattan from his home in Jersey City, New Jersey. He heads to a Citi Bike docking station, picks up a bike and begins a day of pedaling that will last about six hours, transferring bicycles from locations with too much supply to spots with too little.

Dennis started “rebalancing” bikes nine months ago, and that’s helped him accrue a stunning collection of statistics: more than 15,000 rides, 920 hours on the bike and 5,357 miles pedaled. It’s also earned him “Power Angel” status — and up to $3,000 a month as part of Lyft Inc.’s Bike Angel program.

Lyft operates Citi Bike and municipal bikeshare programs in nine other US cities, including Chicago and San Francisco. Its bike app tells riders which docking stations are in need of wheels and pays out credit and cash to encourage them to help out by dropping off or picking up their bike at one of them. The more bikes are needed, the heftier the rewards. It’s a program that saves Lyft money, as well as an example of how behavioral economics can encourage local residents to solve problems in their communities.

Rebalancing bikes is one of those problems. In New York City alone, which is the most widely used of the 61 docked bikeshare systems in the US, Citi Bike has grown to 27,000 bikes. That’s double the number it had less than two years ago.  And in August, the program had its highest ridership ever: 3.7 million rides.

Since January 2021, Lyft has paid out “in the low seven figures” to this corps of riders, says Laura Fox, Lyft’s general manager for Citi Bike, saving money and time on moves that would otherwise be handled by employee valets redirecting traffic at docking stations or ferrying bikes around in vans.

Rides enabled by bike angels are 80% cheaper than those enabled by these other two methods. And the program cuts out 500 tons of CO2 emissions a year, according to a 2019 study by researchers from Lyft, Uber Technologies Inc. and Cornell University.

Bike Angels illustrates the benefits of incentivizing people to make small changes to help solve larger problems. “There are a number of people that have altruistic goals with their rides, if it just involves a very slight inconvenience to them,” says Shane Henderson, a professor of operations research and information engineering at Cornell University and one of the authors of the study. “A small incentive is really something that helps trigger that behavior.”

This same reward model is being used to solve other civic concerns, from fighting pollution to monitoring local government. New York City’s Citizens Air Complaint Program compensates people who send a video showing a commercial vehicle idling for more than three minutes, paying a 25% cut of fines collected. One person made more than $36,000.  Critics of these programs say they can create unintended consequences.

Meanwhile, the nonprofit Documenters pays between $16 and $20 an hour for assignments that help make local government more transparent, including taking notes during public meetings. The pay is a minimum of $54 a meeting. Since it started in 2016, it’s paid out more than $363,000 in the seven US cities where it operates. In July, it received a $10 million award to expand its work of countering the decline of local journalism outlets.

In six years, it’s trained over 2,000 people and covered 2,300 public meetings, says Max Resnik, the group’s network manager. (Perhaps, unsurprisingly, Resnik is also a Citi Bike “Power Angel.” He’s logged more than 2,600 trips in New York City.)

For Richard Dennis, rebalancing Citi Bikes became a daily activity after he retired from 30 years working as a vice president and business coordinator at a bank. He was spending more time leisurely exploring Jersey City when he realized he was inadvertently working as an “Angel” and accumulating credit toward free e-bike rides and the program’s $185 annual membership fee. These two rewards account for roughly 80% of Lyft’s spending on perks, Fox says.

Within a few months, Dennis started doing exactly what Citi Bike and behavioral economics predicted: making small changes in his routes to pick up extra points. Ultimately, he earned so much credit that Lyft asked if he wanted his reward in a gift card or money deposited into a bank account.

 “I just kind of stumbled onto the fact that you could earn money doing this,” he says, and soon became curious if it would be worth coming into Manhattan specifically to rebalance. He knew the stations were bigger — the largest, at West 59th Street & Amsterdam Avenue, has 117 docks — but was it worth the $5 PATH ticket?

In December 2021, he decided to find out. Lyft had recently introduced the multiplier — double the points after one points-earning ride in 24 hours — and Dennis earned enough points in 15 minutes to almost pay for a full month membership. It was like a game — 500 points for an Angel water bottle, 1,500 for a custom fob and 2,500 for fingerless gloves (so riders can still use the app). “I was hooked,” he says.

There are also the practical logistics of spending so much time on the road. Dennis has learned where the best of the city’s limited public amenities are — “I have a little mental map of bathrooms and water fountains,” he says — but doesn’t take a midday break to eat lunch. “You always gotta be earning.”

Dennis is consistently in the top 10 of the leaderboard that tracks 44,000 bike angels in New York City. The all-time record-holder hit enough points in July to get a payout of $4,799.

Like any master of his craft, Dennis says he can recognize other Power Angels on the street. “It’s friendly,” he says. “It’s nearly limitless the amount of points you can make, so there’s always points to go around for everybody.”