Divvy data

I appreciate DNAinfo’s efforts in crunching Divvy ridership data to produce a series on usage patterns in neighborhoods like Uptown, Logan Square, and Lakeview. However, their method has resulted in a couple of articles that dramatically underreported the number of rides taken to and from new South Side stations.

The rate at which women are signing up for new Divvy memberships is slowly increasing, but the rate at which female members use Divvy for trips is increasing even more slowly.

The monthly count of bike-share trips in Chicago peaked this July at 410,392 trips, according to a new data release from Divvy. Trips then declined by five percent from July to August, which is traditionally a slow month due to vacations. While there's now a full year of trip data on Divvy, the staged rollout last fall (through October) kept ridership relatively low during the first few months.

Divvy announced the Divvy Data Challenge's six winners this morning on its website. I talked to three winners to learn how they created their submissions, and what they learned about Divvy users in the process. The Data Challenge began February 11, when Divvy released data about 759,788 trips taken in 2013 and asked the public to create visualizations of numbers and patterns about bike-share in Chicago.

Divvy's data release last month raised as many questions as it answered about bike-share use in Chicago. Chicago Spectrum was the first to point out that there's a large gap between male and female Divvy members. Women make up 31 percent of the membership, but the trip data showed that women made only 21 percent of the trips.

Last week CDOT released data for all Divvy trips taken by members and 24-hour pass holders in 2013, and the agency is looking for the public's help in uncovering any patterns. The data includes the station where the trip began, the station where it ended, start time, end time, and whether the user had a membership or 24-hour pass.

Divvy completed the first season's rollout with the installation of the 300th station at Lincoln/Halsted/Fullerton yesterday afternoon. As the system has grown, annual members are making more trips, even while the temperature drops.

Last Friday, Divvy eclipsed Capital Bikeshare in Washington, D.C., to become the second largest bike-share system in the United States.

Steven Vance is the self-described “data geek” at Streetsblog Chicago, but even a right-brained type like myself couldn’t help but be intrigued by some recently revealed stats and charts about Divvy bike-share use patterns. Chicago Department of Transportation Deputy Commissioner Scott Kubly shared them during a talk at last week’s Complete Streets Symposium, hosted by CDOT, the CTA and the professional group the Intelligent Transportation Society, which kind of sounds like an '80s synth-pop band.