The New Divvy Bikes App Is Handy, But There’s Room for Improvement

Earlier this month Divvy launched the Divvy Bikes app, which allows riders to buy passes, plan routes, find available bikes and check them out, and locate open docks to park the cycles after they finish their trip. The app, presented by Showtime, will eventually include more features, including trip history for riders to keep track of how many calories they burned.

It’s still possible to use the Transit app to buy passes and unlock bikes. To date, more than one million bikes have been unlocked with the Transit app.

To encourage more people to download the Divvy Bikes app, the bike-share system is giving away free rides to new app users through June 17th using the code FIRSTRIDEFREE. To redeem the free ride, download the app from the Android or Apple store and enter the code when prompted to add a discount code.

Several friends recently asked me if I thought the new Divvy Bikes app was worth getting. I was curious to try the new features.

In map view, zooming out uses colored dots for station locations: red for empty, yellow for nearly empty, and green for all the others. It’s easy to tell at a glance whether bikes are available at nearby stations. A toggle at the upper left corner of the screen switches from bike priority (looking for a bike) to dock priority (looking for open docks).

I asked a few friends for opinions on this feature. Two colorblind friends could only distinguish two out of three dot colors. Andrew Maselli thought it would be more accessible to colorblind users if an X was added to red dots and a dash was added to yellow dots. If you copy and paste the image above at this web site, you can simulate how the map view looks to a colorblind person.

The trip planner feature gives directions in addition to the location of the nearest Divvy station to your destination. As with any online mapping app, results may vary. The route suggested below for getting from Dearborn and Adams to 1200 West Taylor is far from ideal. I tried it from a few different starting points with the same destination and got this goofy routing via Roosevelt, which would be hazardous, annoying and longer than necessary -- obviously there's no need to head south to Roosevelt when your destination is on Taylor.

The app certainly isn’t pulling its directions from Google maps, where I got this result, with a campus-savvy direct routing through UIC.

Rand McNally gave me this – a good route that may be easier for people who get confused trying to navigate through UIC.

To use the Divvy Bikes app to unlock a bike, go to a Divvy station with bikes available, open the app, hit Unlock a Bike, and you’ll get a code that’s valid for five minutes. Transit app has an identical function.

For general transit use, I’m a big fan of the well-designed Transit app. However, if I just want to get a bike or dock information quickly, the Divvy app is a bit more convenient, especially in the zoomed out color dot view shown above.

I’d give this app a B. With a better directions function and accessibility for colorblind folks, I’d give it A+.

In other Divvy news, the $3 single ride option, which was rolled out in February, has been used more than 30,000 times. Two electrical-assist “bike trains” will hit the streets next month, replacing vans used for “rebalancing” the cycles. The Divvy system turns five next month.

This post is made possible by a grant from Freeman Kevenides, a Chicago, Illinois personal injury law firm representing and advocating for bicyclists, pedestrians and vulnerable road users.  The content belongs to Streetsblog Chicago, and Freeman Kevenides Law Firm neither endorses nor exercises editorial control over the content.