City: Lyft’s bike share plan for Divvy topped Uber’s unworkable idea
Six years ago, Chicago charted a course on how to bring bike-sharing to our city. We created Divvy and built a citywide bike-share system through a public-private partnership. Divvy has been a remarkable success story on every level. It has become an iconic piece of Chicago’s transportation landscape and sets the gold standard for bike-sharing nationwide.
Despite the recent article claiming otherwise, the proposed contract amendment introduced by the Chicago Department of Transportation and Mayor Rahm Emanuel — to expand and improve Divvy in partnership with our operator Lyft — represents the best deal for the city, taxpayers and bike-share in Chicago.
Instead of building on the six years of investment and sweat equity that has made Divvy a success, Uber presented a proposal that foolishly seeks to throw that progress out the window and start over to build a new bike-share program. That’s not a scenario the city will entertain. The idea that Uber could, from scratch, achieve citywide service by May and match the current level of customer service that Chicagoans expect isn’t just implausible, it’s laughable.
Further, the financial aspects of Uber’s offer are highly misleading and pale in comparison to Lyft’s solid commitment to the city to invest $50 million in capital and provide a guarantee of at least $77 million in cash to the city to support transportation.
Under the proposed expansion of the Divvy system with Lyft, the city retains the authority to set quality standards, approve significant price changes and share in rider and advertising revenues in partnership with the operator of high-quality bike-sharing systems across the country. Such control would not exist in Uber’s proposal for a privatized bike-share system. And perhaps more importantly, Uber has never executed a bike-sharing program to the scale of what exists in Chicago to the standards Divvy riders expect.
Although the article incorrectly argued otherwise, the only thing the city left on the table was an unworkable idea.
Rebekah Scheinfeld, commissioner, Chicago Department of Transportation