Divvy

When I encountered Gary Resner, an accountant, and P.E. teacher Jessica Cervantes standing with Divvy bikes underneath the ‘L’ tracks at Clark and Lake, they were looking for a place to dock their rides, so I directed them to the Daley Plaza station, but not before asking them about their bike-share experience.

I visited several Divvy bike-share docking stations on my way downtown from the Northwest Side this safternoon, but didn't see much activity, save for Divvy staffers standing by to assist customers.

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

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 went on a 25-mile bike ride yesterday to check up on livable streets projects around the city (final destination: Lao Beijing for dried chili chicken). On the trip I got a good look at the restriped bike lanes on King Drive in Bronzeville, the conversion of the Garfield Green Line station to a Green/Red/shuttle bus super station, the Red Line South reconstruction project, and lots of Divvy bike-share stations. I spotted three new Divvy locations and since my ride have heard about three more. Add the original Daley Plaza station and there are at least seven installed. Here's a quick recap of where you can find Divvy stations so far, and in a separate post I'll give a status report on the other projects.

Two of the major topics of the Mayor's Bicycle Advisory Council meeting on Wednesday were bike-share and the Dearborn Street bike lane.

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.

Yesterday’s article about Divvy bike-share in Crain’s touched on a couple of interesting aspects of Chicago’s road to launching the Divvy bike-share system, which should lead to a huge spike in ridership and safer conditions for cycling.