![]() ![]() ![]() Greg Baldi rides a Divvy on Critical Mass Friday evening. “Chicago’s federally funded Divvy bicycle-sharing program rolled out on Friday, and the shared experience some customers came away with was frustration,” Hilkevitch wrote. The complaints included stations that had no available docking capacity, forcing users to park at a nearby station one downtown station that wasn’t working at all inaccurate information about the quantity of bikes at stations from the CycleFinder app and individual docks that wouldn’t accept bikes. Reporter Jon Hilkevitch previously published a hatchet piece characterizing the late fines and $1,200 replacement fee for lost or stolen bikes as onerous burdens, even though these policies are typical of successful bike-share programs in other cities.įor Friday’s article he also chose to accentuate the negative, quoting several customers who complained that they’d had problems with the system and zero who said they enjoyed using it. Those numbers represent a modest success, but the Tribune article published last Friday evening, “Opening day woes greet Divvy bike sharing roll-out,” paints the first day as a dismal failure. 4,123 Divvy trips were taken from Friday morning to Sunday night, with 3,225 made by members and 898 made by people who bought 24-hour passes, according to the Chicago Department of Transportation. As of today, more than 1,700 Chicago residents have bought memberships. To encourage turnaround of the bikes, a $2 late fee applies for the next 30 minutes, with charges rising steeply for subsequent half hours. Photo: John GreenfieldĪ $7 daily pass or $75 annual membership entitles users to an unlimited number of half-hour trips. Docking station by The Smokedaddy restaurant in Wicker Park. It will expand to 750 cycles at 75 stations by the end of this week, 3,000 bikes and 300 stations by the end of August, with the remaining 1,000 bikes and 100 stations installed next spring. The system launched Friday with 700 bikes at 61 stations, located within a roughly three-mile radius of the center of town. Problems with docking station power failures, common in the first two weeks, have largely subsided.Ĭhicago’s system will eventually include 4,000 bikes, clunky-but-comfy cruisers painted the powder-blue shade of the Chicago flag’s stripes, at 400 docking stations. #Divvy bike customer service software#NYC’s Citi Bike program has seen more than its fair share of bugs, attributed to an Alta subcontractor switching software developers, but the system has still been wildly popular, with more than more than 50,000 annual memberships sold and 500,000 trips taken to-date. The system, funded with $27.5 million in federal and local grants, is owned by the city of Chicago and operated by Alta Bike Share, Inc., which also runs public bike programs in Washington, D.C., Boston, Chattanooga and New York City. I also spoke to plenty of satisfied customers along the way. For the most part, these seemed like minor speed bumps as the bike-share staffers and users get accustomed to this brand-new infrastructure. But on Sunday I rode a Divvy to and attempted to dock at all 68 of the existing stations and witnessed only a few glitches. ![]() To hear the Chicago Tribune tell it, people who used the Divvy bike-share system on its first day of operations last Friday experienced nothing but headaches. In a hurry? Read a shorter version of this piece at, an environmental news website. ![]()
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