It may take a cracked skull or two to initiate talk of a concurrent helmet-share program. But tourists, a hunk of Divvy’s audience, will almost certainly not have protective headgear. But who among us-especially the non-bike-owning public-carries a cycling helmet? “Divvy strongly encourages you to wear a helmet when you ride,” the program’s website says. “Don’t forget your helmet,” reads the kiosk.
(After five minutes, if you don’t successfully use the code, you have to swipe your card again to request a new set of numbers.) (A security deposit hold of $1 per bike is placed on your card.) I typed the combination of 1s, 2s and 3s into a dock’s keypad, and a couple seconds later, I was able to pull the bicycle from the rack. Passholders get a receipt from the solar-powered kiosk with a printed five digit ride code. Members are sent a key three to five days after registering. (The city launched with 700 bikes at 61 stations, but will eventually have 4,000 cycles at 400 stations.) I was able to find a station just a block south from the TOC office at State and Van Buren Streets flush with about a dozen bikes.
DIVVY CHICAGO FULL
This info is especially useful on a return trip if you encounter a full station, as some riders did on day one, you’re given 15 extra minutes to locate the next closest station that has empty docks. The app CycleFinder pulls in this information, as well. But your first stop should be the online station map, a tool allowing users to see Divvy spots close to their starting point and near their destination, which stations are in and out of service and a real-time count of the number of bikes parked and how many open docks are available. Sign up for a $75 annual membership online, or purchase a 24-hour pass for $7 with a credit or debit card at the monolith touchscreen kiosk located at each station. Taking out a bike is as simple as buying a CTA farecard at one of the agency’s debit/credit vending machines. Astride the powder-blue bikes, a new menu of possibilities revealed itself: Au Cheval, Little Goat and its sun-drenched rooftop, Bill Kim’s bellyQ. (Owned by the city and operated by Alta Bicycle Share, Inc, Divvy takes its name from the idea of dividing and sharing the cycles.) Empty of stomach yesterday, just the fourth day of the program, TOC managing editor Brent DiCrescenzo and I set out to rent a pair of the bicycles. It was with the promise of an expanded lunch radius that I was eyeing Divvy, Chicago’s nascent federally-funded bike-share program, which facilitates rides less than 30 minutes from station to station-perfect for an outing to a restaurant and back to work. Anyone who works in the southeastern edge of the Loop, as I do, thinks of the West Loop as an inaccessible lunching Shangri-La, a teasing hub of desirable restaurants sitting just far away enough as to be impractical to the typical nine-to-fiver on his hour-long break.Ī man can eat only so many burrito bowls.
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