Divvy is a Chicago based Bike Sharing Program offered by Lyft. People can rent bikes(cycles) from a Station, travel, and dock it back at the destination station. Users will be charged based on usage.
Impact of COVID
Like all other companies, Divvy was also affected by #COVID19. Number of rides per month dropped significantly starting from the end of March, coinciding with The Government of Illinois’ “Stay-At-Home” order starting 21-Mar’20.
The chart below shows a steep drop in the ridership count for Apr 2020(Red line). The damage is clearly visible comparing with past years #data(2017 to 2020).
To determine how bad it is, we need to understand that Bike Sharing in Chicago is seasonal. Usage is high in summers, and low in winters. The ridership gradually increases from March, peaks in August and drops as winter starts to kick in. But 2020 was different, as restrictions were imposed in Mar-Apr, and the infection rate was rapidly increasing. Months Apr’20 to Jun’20 performed way worse looking at historic data.
Cumulatively, number of rides from Apr-Jun’18 is 1.05 Million; Apr-Jun’19 is 1.1 Million; Apr-Jun’21 is just 0.61 Million.
That’s approximately 450,000 less rides that previous two years in same time window.
Initial Recovery Phase:
Fortunately the first wave of COVID infections started to go down by June 2020. People started venturing out, and the recovery begins. By July, Divvy is almost completely recovered as it matches previous years performance. The momentum continued and it outperformed all previous years and hit the maximum usage ever in August.
Impact of Second wave:
Second COVID wave lasted from mid Oct’20 till Feb’21, but this time around, it literally had no impact on the number of rides, if anything only the count increased. Which is really interesting when compared how the users responded during first wave.
One possible reason could be increase in vaccination rates could have reduced the fear among users about getting infected.
Here’s the most impressive part:
If anything that is more impressive, is the data for this year. 2021 outperformed all previous years. Except for the months Jan and Feb, all other months have the highest recorded rides. Check out the graph below.
To put it in perspective, Mar-Sep’21 performed
- 50% more than 2018
- 42% more than 2019
- 70% more than 2020.
This is a massive, in terms of increase in number of ridership.
Some Possible explanations
- First summer of COVID restrictions could have made people get excited.
- Decrease in usage of public transport due to fear of getting infected.
- People prefer to commute solo and maintain distancing, to prevent getting infected.
- Does increase in unemployment helped increase in bike share usage? (Source: ScienceDirect)
- DivvyForAll Program’s impact on people during pandemic
- Increase in remote work, decreased the range of travel to short distances, which makes Bike Sharing more relevant.
Further investigation is required to find what could be the possible reasons for this massive increase.
Work in Progress
Work is in progress, and will keep updating as new insights are derived.
Would love to hear your thoughts, do share them in the comments!
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Lakshmanan Meiyappan is currently a Computer Science Graduate Student at The University of Illinois at Chicago, working on Distributed Computing, Data Science and Software Engineering. Prior to pursuing his masters, he worked as Full Stack Software Engineer for two years.
You can connect with me on LinkedIn, GitHub and my website.
