bike share

[This article also ran in Checkerboard City, John's column in Newcity magazine, which hits the streets on Wednesday evenings.]

When I heard that Bicycling Magazine gave Chicago second place in its “America’s Best Bike Cities” ratings, just behind New York and two slots above Portland, I was puzzled. However, I’m starting to warm up to the idea that our city and NYC deserve credit for taking bold action to improve cycling.

Yesterday, the Tribune ran an opinion piece slamming the Divvy funding model, written by Diana Sroka Rickert from the Illinois Policy Institute, a conservative think tank. Rickert argued that Milwaukee’s brand-new Bublr bike-share system, named after the local term for a water fountain, used a superior method because much of the funding came from private donors, largely corporate sponsors.

Andrew Tangel at the Wall Street Journal had an encouraging update this week on the Citi Bike buyout plan first reported by Dana Rubinstein in Capital New York. It looks like the city is days away from announcing a deal in which REQX Ventures, an affiliate of the Related Companies and its Equinox unit, will buy out Alta Bicycle Share, the company that operates Citi Bike. The implications are big -- not just for bike-share in New York, but for several other major American cities as well.

Despite continually growing ridership, Alta Bicycle Share-operated bike-share systems across America will probably not be adding bikes or docks this year. The bankruptcy of Montreal-based Public Bike Share Company, known as Bixi, which developed and manufactured the equipment that Alta's systems use, has disrupted the supply chain that numerous cities were pinning their expansion plans on.

Last week, some very exciting new research was released, showing a significant drop in cyclist injuries in cities that launched bike-share systems. Unfortunately, the authors and many media organizations, like the Washington Post, overlooked that remarkable finding, and instead focused on one statistic that fails to tell the overall story: the proportion of cyclist injuries that are head injuries.

Last month, I had the chance to use bike-share systems in two Dutch cities and Seville, Spain. The systems – OV-fiets in Rotterdam and Nijmegen and Sevici in Seville – differ from one another and from Chicago's Divvy system in several key ways. Together, they make for an instructive comparison about how our friends in other countries get around. 

With Divvy slated to expand by 175 stations this year, there’s an unprecedented opportunity to increase bike ridership in Chicago. There’s also an opportunity to rethink the Divvy bike design.

[This piece ran last week in Checkerboard City, my column in Newcity magazine, which hits the street on Wednesday evenings. After yesterday's gorgeous weather, with temperatures in the 50s, I was concerned the piece might seem a bit dated today if I syndicated it on Streetsblog. Fortunately, six-to-eight inches of snow are predicted for this evening, so we can look forward to more Divvy slush fun.]