Metro

Electric Citi Bikes return after being pulled for safety issues

Citi Bike’s popular electric bikes will return Wednesday — 10 months after the company yanked them over safety issues.

“A few hundred” pedal-powered e-bikes will hit city streets Wednesday morning, after which there will be a “gradual” increase to “thousands” by sometime this summer, said Citi Bike general manager Laura Fox.

Lyft, which owns the bike rental program, pulled the entire e-bike fleet last April after oversensitive front brakes sent some riders flying off their bikes.

The company insists new modifications to the bike’s design have resolved that issue.

The retrofit shifts the motor and brakes from the front wheel to the rear, and eliminates the bikes’ gear systems, officials said.

The company said the rear-wheel motor shifts the center of gravity to underneath the rider, which provides more control.

“The motor is under your seat where the weight is,” Fox told The Post. “In the same way that you would have rear-wheel drive for a car, you get more traction.”

The new batteries are also 20 percent stronger and don’t need to be turned on manually, officials said.

But the company has yet to come up with a way to charge the bikes at docking stations — meaning Citi Bike workers will still have to manually replace dying or dead batteries, temporarily taking those bikes out of service.

An e-bike trip will cost 10 cents per minute for Citi Bike subscribers, 5 cents per minute for “reduced fare” subscribers and 15 cents per minute for non-subscribers.

The juiced-up two-wheelers can go a maximum of 18 mph.

The e-bikes were enormously popular in the few months they were out on the street, averaging three times the number of rides per bike per day than the company’s non-electric models, according to Lyft.