Sean Wiedel

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.

The Chicago Department of Transportation and Divvy will be installing 175 bike-share stations this year with a new method that avoids last year's haphazard and seemingly random distribution. Instead, they will be placing all stations in each of 10 selected areas at once. This way, CDOT assistant commissioner Sean Wiedel told Streetsblog, "that area will have an instant network" of stations.

For a very new American bike-share system, Divvy is doing well, but it has a lot of room to improve, according to the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy's new Bike Share Planning Guide [PDF]. The guide includes best practices for designing, distributing, and marketing this new form of transit. While Divvy is still growing and hasn't gone through a full peak season yet, the guide illustrates one area where Chicago should focus on improving its bike-share system: station density.

At last Wednesday's Mayor's Bicycle Advisory Council meeting, assistant transportation commissioner Sean Wiedel shared Divvy's cold-weather operating strategy.

There’s more good news on the Divvy bike-share front. The Chicago Department of Transportation announced this morning that they scored a $3 million federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement grant to add 75 more docking stations to the 400 already planned. The system recently reached 300 stations and 3,000 bikes.

Divvy bike-share continues to expand, Assistant Transportation Commissioner Sean Wiedel said at the Mayor's Bicycle Advisory Council on Wednesday, and should reach 300 stations by the end of September. As of today there are 222 stations. Wiedel reported that over 7,700 annual members and numerous 24-hour pass users have made almost 325,000 trips and pedaled almost 950,000 miles since June 28.

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

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