Chicago commuters, forget the CTA. Instead, hop on a Divvy bike for a more efficient commute.
New information from Divvy shows that traveling through the city on a Divvy bike is often faster than using public transportation.
Shaun Jacobsen, of the blog Transitized, tied for first place in the Divvy Data Challenge with his number crunching and visualization of commute time between the top 1,000 Divvy station pairs in the city. His resulting interactive graph shows that "in most cases," it's faster to take a Divvy bike than to use public transportation.
The biggest time saver using Divvy is between the bike-share stations at Lake Park Avenue/47th Street and Fort Dearborn Drive/31st Street near the lake. Taking a Divvy bike on the 2.7-mile trek will reportedly save the average commuter 27 minutes, according to Jacobsen's analysis. Two bus trips are required to get commuters between these Divvy stations using the CTA (the #6 and #3 buses), making the commute much longer than it needs to be.
While the majority of routes are faster on Divvy bikes, several are actually slower. Jacobsen only included rides that were 10 minutes or less longer than a commute using the CTA. Many trips where public transportation is faster are in the Loop or on the Near North Side.
Conversely, many trips where using Divvy bikes are faster are on the South Side.
Overall, Jacobsen calculated that more than 32,000 hours were saved in 2014 by Divvy cyclists. More than half a million rides were taken between the top 1,000 station pairs included in his data set.
Check a map of all Divvy stations here.
