Yesterday some time before midnight, a Divvy rider pedaled into the record books by taking Chicago’s ten-millionth bike-share trip. That puts our city in the elite ranks of the Ten Million Rides Club of U.S. systems. The only other members are Washington D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare and New York’s Citi Bike, which launched in 2010 and May 2013 (a month before Divvy), respectively. That’s quite a feather in our cap (or helmet, if you wear one while using bike-share).
The city announced that Divvy was closing in on the ten-million mark last Thursday, when at 11:15 a.m. the number of rides taken was 9,989,660. At 11:45 last night the meter on the system’s website had hit 10,000,199 trips, which means that 10,519 rides were taken in roughly 4.5 days. Not too shabby for some of the shortest, gloomiest days of the year.
After Streetsblog tweeted out the good news, the DC and NYC systems welcomed Chicago to the club:
Divvy is touting the achievement as a win for the environment and public health. They say that the ten million trips represents 20,345,107 miles ridden, 13,834,673 lbs of CO2 reduced, 874,839,673 calories burned (that’s the equivalent of 3,499,358 Snickers bars), and 834,149 gallons of gasoline saved.
The bike-share system hasn’t yet released the name of the ten-millionth rider, who will win a free year of membership, plus three annual memberships to give away to others, but they plan to make an announcement tomorrow. But if you rode bike-share in Chicago between Thursday morning and last night, give your self a pat on the back for helping Divvy make history.
