Divvy

The number of transportation choices available to Chicagoans continues to grow, particularly as shared options like car-sharing and Divvy bikes become ever more popular. Yet these options can turn the simple act of planning a trip across town into a complicated exercise that requires weighing multiple factors, like cost, convenience, time, and ever-changing availability. RideScout, a new app that was recently updated to include Chicago, presents numerous transportation choices all within a single smartphone screen. After factoring in your origin, destination, and the time of day, RideScout compares choices like walking, bicycling, Divvy bike-sharing, Metra, CTA trains and buses, taxis, Zipcar, and SideCar shared rides.

In this final installment of my interview with Chicago Department of Transportation Commissioner Rebekah Scheinfeld, we talked about the Divvy expansion, traffic cameras, protected bike lanes, and her overall goals as CDOT chief. Read the first and second parts of the interview here and here.

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. 

Chicago’s most notorious bike-share haters, married couple and lawyers David Kolin and Jeannine Cordero, have gotten Divvy deliverance. In the wake of a lawsuit by the pair, the city has removed a “hideous” bike-share station from their Lakeview block. However, it’s not for the reasons you might expect.

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.

Last month, it was a bummer when the Illinois Department of Transportation announced $52.7 million in funding for transportation projects, including many bike and pedestrian projects, but the expansion of Divvy into the suburbs wasn’t one of them. However, officials say they’re hopeful money can be found to extend the system past the city limits.

Were you dismayed in 2006, when the city sold the naming rights to the Millennium Park bike station to McDonald’s? Then you’ll be glad to hear that Divvy’s new sponsor is a company that promotes health, rather than undermines it. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, the state’s largest health insurer, has inked a five-year, $12.5 million sponsorship contract to support the bike-share system, as well as other cycling initiatives.

The city is gearing up to add 175 more Divvy bike-share stations this year, bringing the total to 475. On Thursday, 49th Ward Alderman Joe Moore hosted a community meeting at Eugene Field elementary to discuss potential Divvy station locations within Rogers Park. The meeting also covered the proposed north-south neighborhood greenway that’s a ballot item in the ward’s upcoming participatory budgeting election. Joining Moore to discuss these projects were Chicago Department of Transportation deputy commissioner Sean Wiedel and bikeways planner David Smith.

Divvy announced the Divvy Data Challenge's six winners this morning on its website. I talked to three winners to learn how they created their submissions, and what they learned about Divvy users in the process. The Data Challenge began February 11, when Divvy released data about 759,788 trips taken in 2013 and asked the public to create visualizations of numbers and patterns about bike-share in Chicago.