Photo: Divvy-Bikes

Record numbers revealed for Chicago’s new bike share system

30 July 2013

by Richard Forster

Mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel has announced that in the first three weeks of operation of the Divvy bike share system, Chicagoans and visitors to the city have taken more than 50,000 trips and have collectively ridden an estimated 281,635 kilometres.

“In a very short time, Divvy has made a significant impact on the way people move around Chicago,” said Mayor Emanuel.  “We are extremely pleased by the amount of participation and enthusiasm Chicagoans and our visitors have shown for bike sharing.”

On the afternoon of Saturday 20 July 2013, Divvy was the busiest bike sharing system in the world as measured by the percentage of available bikes in use, beating the popular systems of Rio de Janeiro, Taipei and New York City, according to researchers at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), an interdisciplinary research group at University College London.

Divvy staff plan to install up to 40 new stations, rasing the total number to 300 stations and 3,000 bikes by the end of this summer.  The new locations are denoted on the stations map at DivvyBikes.com.  By next spring, Divvy will be in 400 neighbourhood locations with 4,000 bikes.

Each Divvy station has a touchscreen kiosk, station map, and a docking system that releases bikes using a Member key or ride code. Customers can purchase US$75 annual memberships or US$7 24-hour passes, which allow riders unlimited trips in that period. The first 30 minutes of every trip are included in the cost of the membership or pass, and incremental fees apply to trips that exceed 30 minutes.

Annual members use a personal key used to quickly unlock bikes from any station.  More than 3,000 Chicagoans have already signed up for Divvy Annual Memberships at DivvyBikes.com.

The system is dubbed ‘Divvy’ to reflect the nature of bike share, where members ‘divide and share’ the use of the bikes. The bicycles’ distinctive Chicago Blue paint is the same colour as the stripes on the Chicago city flag.

 

 

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