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Chicago bike sharing will be known as Divvy, be Chicago flag blue

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I saw a lot of Divvys on the streets yesterday.  They had installed a new Divvy station at Michigan and East Lake Shore Drive, pretty much blocking the pedestrian area from the north side of ELSD to Michigan btw.

Lots of Divvys cruising around Streeterville.  These are not experienced riders.  Lots of slow swervers splitting lanes.  I saw one nearly hit a bus.  I saw another group of riders on the sidewalks.  Divvy seems to be putting a lot of clueless riders on the streets. 

I'm going to make a point to Divvy today! I was in Denver last weekend and used their B-Cycle bikes, they worked great.

Also, Re: the noobs on Divvy bikes - this is the final element of the evil plan to put everyone on a bike a la Agenda 21 :)

Your enthusiasm for the Bike Share program is... subtle :-)

Sounds like a legitimate concern....to the extent one can compare different cities with different driving cultures and different infrastructure, have their been reports of crashes from other cities with similar programs?


Juan Primo said:

Lots of Divvys cruising around Streeterville.  These are not experienced riders.  Lots of slow swervers splitting lanes.  I saw one nearly hit a bus.  I saw another group of riders on the sidewalks.  Divvy seems to be putting a lot of clueless riders on the streets. 

Hi Juan,

NYC just launched CitiBike a little over a month ago. You may find this article interesting: 

http://www.streetsblog.org/2013/07/03/the-citi-bike-story-no-ones-t...

I have seen a lot of Divvy bikes in Lakeview, Lincoln Park, and on the east end of Wicker Park.  Most of the riders I have seen seem to be riding just like the rest of us.  Of course, that is good news and bad news since some of the rest of us are a little scary on bikes! :-)

Was driving down Roosevelt (yes, in a car) this morning, and saw a Divvy station on the south side of the street at Clinton.  It seemed to be about 1/2 full, so I suppose that people are using that station.

My dissent has been officially monitored.

But really, you don't have to pull up someone's blog from another city to try to disprove a negative opinion.  I'm just telling a story about how I saw Divvys being used in a touristy area.  I realize tour job is PR but don't get em all bunched up when the negative inevitable happens.  We share our impressions on this forum.

Thanks anyhow giving me safety data on a one month old program.


Elliot Greenberger (Divvy) said:

Hi Juan,

NYC just launched CitiBike a little over a month ago. You may find this article interesting: 

http://www.streetsblog.org/2013/07/03/the-citi-bike-story-no-ones-t...

FWIW, Capital Bikeshare ("CaBi") has been up and running for about 2.5 years now (30X longer than Citibike) and has carried 4+ million riders, many of whom have been tourists and/or infrequent bicyclists. There are some here who will tell you that CaBi riders are worse than riders on their own bikes, but this has not been borne out in the statistics. Injury rates per million rides are much lower for CaBi riders than for cyclists as a whole: as of May, about 70 bikes had been totaled, so 99.99825% of trips ended happily. Equally notable, zero head injuries or fatalities have resulted, even though most users do NOT wear helmets.

To reiterate from my infamously snarky comment above, bike sharing has worked fine for billions of rides by millions of people in hundreds of cities around the world. It's not going to fail here.

No one is saying it is going to fail here.  But we certainly have to watch out for the drum beats of those that oppose.  At least one dive bar in Bucktown, for example, is actively screaming about the Divvy rack taking out a number of "free" parking spaces in front of the bar.   Now it would seem to me that we don't want to encourage parking (free or otherwise) in front of bars, but this is the kind of thing that can throw more sticks into the wheels.

Oh, and the "zero head injury" claim for capital bike share.... it depends on how you define the term.  

payton said:

FWIW, Capital Bikeshare ("CaBi") has been up and running for about 2.5 years now (30X longer than Citibike) and has carried 4+ million riders, many of whom have been tourists and/or infrequent bicyclists. There are some here who will tell you that CaBi riders are worse than riders on their own bikes, but this has not been borne out in the statistics. Injury rates per million rides are much lower for CaBi riders than for cyclists as a whole: as of May, about 70 bikes had been totaled, so 99.99825% of trips ended happily. Equally notable, zero head injuries or fatalities have resulted, even though most users do NOT wear helmets.

To reiterate from my infamously snarky comment above, bike sharing has worked fine for billions of rides by millions of people in hundreds of cities around the world. It's not going to fail here.

Several short instructional videos have just been posted by Divvy here:http://vimeo.com/album/2450111

Here's one on how to navigate through the 24-hour pass screens:

Teach Me How To Divvy: Getting a 24-Hour Pass from Divvy Bikes on Vimeo.

I'm wondering how this would work for travelers.  Say I have a four hour layover  between trains and would like to ride the lakeshore path.  I can't see how it would help.  Perhaps to get to a hotel, assuming there is a Divvy station near it.

I will say that when I spent a few days in Portand, OR recently with my own bike, I saw a lot of those (red) cruisers and a lot of bike stations, not only near downtown.  But then visiting Portland is like visiting a foreign country without the airline torture.

The Divvy isn't for cruising around for 4 hours. But it could certainly get someone during a 4-hour interlude TO the park for a walk or ice cream and a ride back to the train station. It is not for cruising - it is for getting places.  I noticed the most northern Divvy just jumped from Notebaert Museum to closer to Belmont.  As soon as stations appear along Irving Park Road, Montrose, Lawrence, and Foster, it is going to be positively the most attractive way to get around.  But for many of us north siders, without those streets it isn't feasible yet.  Hopefully those 4 northern spots will be installed soon.  Can't wait.

"I'm wondering how this would work for travelers."

I forgot about the $75 fee to even get started.  Dumb, tah, dumb ... duuuuuumb. 

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