Capital Bikeshare

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.

A new study [PDF] commissioned by the Active Transportation Alliance put forth a "conservative" estimate that Chicagoans make nearly 125,000 bicycle trips each day for transportation, in addition to purely recreational trips. Almost 91,000, or 73 percent, of the trips are utilitarian – for shopping, errands, church, and doctor appointments.

Imagine if almost everybody who rode the Chicago Transit Authority, a public transportation system subsidized with taxpayer money, was Caucasian. Denver found itself in an analogous situation last year, when a survey revealed that, in a city where almost half of residents are people of color, 89.9 percent the people using the publicly funded Denver B-cycle system were non-Hispanic whites.

I’ve long considered the Chicago Tribune’s Jon Hilkevitch to be one of Chicago’s best transportation writers. He works fast, gets his numbers straight and often gets the scoop on important stories, usually writing from a pro-walking, biking and transit perspective. For example, I always enjoy re-reading a brilliant article he wrote back in 2005, skewering the Daley administration’s pro-car policies. I appreciate that he provides a level-headed foil to his colleague columnist John Kass, a notorious bike-baiter.