Remember the unfortunate young woman who found herself pedaling a Divvy bike on Lake Shore Drive last November? Instead of offering to help the endangered rider, a couple of people driving by thought it was funny to shoot a cell phone video of her, while repeatedly calling her a “dumb b----.” After the clip went viral on YouTube, many more people joined the chorus of ridicule, including a Chicagoist writer and downtown Alderman Brendan Reilly.
A similar incident happened last Saturday morning on the Dan Ryan, but this time the motorists had a more compassionate response. Stephanie Kemen was driving south on the Ryan with her boyfriend when they spotted a woman pedaling on the expressway near 18th Street, RedEye reported. "I felt so bad for her," Kemen said. "I think at first we were laughing ... but her legs looked tired.”
The boyfriend rolled down the window to let the woman know that biking on the Ryan is illegal and dangerous. "She was like, 'I know, I know,' and you could hear in her voice that she was scared s---less," Kemen said. Afterwards, they called 311 and 911 to report the incident to the authorities. State police who responded said they received several calls about an “elderly woman” biking on the expressway, but when they arrived, she was gone. “I hope she’s OK,” Kemen said.
"We don't know who rode the bike nor what the circumstances were, so we don't know enough about the situation to comment on it," Divvy manager Elliot Greenberger told me. "We've served nearly 2.9 million trips in the past 16 months and there have only been a couple of incidents like this that we've become aware of, usually through social media."
Former Active Transportation Alliance staffer Lee Crandell summed up the situation nicely in a comment on the RedEye site:
Divvy users are just regular people, and incidents like this are a good indication of how unintuitive and confusing our streets are for regular people. I can see how if you're not an "avid cyclist" and you're riding on streets you're not familiar with, you could easily end up making a wrong turn onto a highway ramp. And many Chicago streets already feel like expressways, so you might just keep riding before you realize your mistake.
