Chicago’s Divvy bike-share service now covers all of the city’s 50 wards making it operational and accessible to residents and visitors all over the city just in time for warmer weather months ahead, the city’s Department of Transportation announced Tuesday.
City officials made the announcement at Dawes Park on the Southwest Side along with representatives from Lyft, the city bike-share service’s operating arm, and bike advocacy partners such as Equiticity and We Keep You Rollin’.
The Divvy network expansion has largely focused on neighborhoods not well-served by the network, with almost 75% of growth in recent years taking place on the South and West sides as Chicagoans of color were also found to be the predominant demographic for Divvy last year, Transportation Commissioner Gia Biagi said.
“That’s what it should look like because that is the city that we are, so we need to make sure everybody feels invited to use the system,” Biagi said at the news conference.
Lyft installed 100 new bike racks and labeled 233 existing bike racks to designate them as free parking for Divvy e-bikes to improve service for riders in areas where Divvy is now available. The city also announced that as many as 250 new traditional Divvy stations will be installed over the 2023 and 2024 bike-riding seasons, most typically April through October, along with nearly 3,000 new classic Divvy blue bikes that will be added to the current fleet, which currently sits at more than 800 stations and over 15,000 bikes and scooters.
More information, including station locations and bike parking, can be found in the Divvy and Lyft apps and at divvybikes.com.
The new stations will be installed in the northwest, southwest, Far South Side and more areas of Chicago as the service reaches new corners and commuters as well as provide increased service to neighborhoods that already have some Divvy bikes. Some e-bike-only parking stations will also be converted to traditional Divvy stations so that riders will have more opportunities to choose between a classic bike or an e-bike.
Divvy, the largest bike-share system by area in North America now covering 234 square miles, hit a recordof 5.7 million bike trips in 2022, and ridership has also gone up nearly 40% this year compared with last, Biagi said. The bike-share service first hit Chicago streets in 2013.
Chicago’s bike network includes over 420 miles of on-street bikeways and off-street trails, having grown by 100 miles from 2019 to this year with safer and more comfortable routes like protected bike lanes and neighborhood paths.
“It’s not enough for us to only focus on the big commuter routes,” Biagi said. “Those matter, but we have to focus on neighborhoods. How do you grow a cycling network at the neighborhood scale, how do I get to those meaningful destinations in my life, which is not always work. It’s the park, it’s the school, it’s the neighbor’s house. It’s having my kid on a bike behind me, and we’re just going down the street for a ride. Those are meaningful, and that is the network that we are building block by block for every neighborhood in the city.”
Biagi said 10 miles of bikeways are under construction and all current and new protected bike lanes will be curb-protected, concrete bike lanes by the end of 2023.
“We have reached an incredible milestone, with Divvy service now available citywide,” Caroline Samponaro, vice president of transit, bike and scooter policy at Lyft, said in a statement. “Along with our partners at the city, we made a commitment to Chicagoans to expand and modernize Divvy, to ensure that it is an affordable and convenient extension of the public transportation network. Today, we deliver on that promise and chart a course for the next round of network improvements.”