🧵Four views of @DivvyBikes ride data, from June 2013 to May 2024. I've always wanted to compile this data, and I finally did it. A number of interesting things pop up.

1) Member rides grew steadily from 2013-2017 before leveling off, but non-member rides were stable from Day 1.





2) After 2017, seasonal patterns stabilized and the 2019 system expansion didn't seem to impact much.
3) COVID upended everything! Member rides plummeted but non-member rides surged.
4) The launch of e-bikes boosted rides across the board.

Yesterday was Chicago's 187th birthday. ✶🎂✶

This 1836 plat shows the city's extent around the time of incorporation, and how it was laid out. I overlaid modern streets and shorelines to see how things have changed, and how much they've stayed the same!

Some observations: 🧵 Aside from the highway, the street network for Chicago's historic core has changed remarkably little. There were just two bridges in the vicinity, at Kedzie and Dearborn.

By my calculations, there were 3,932 parcels in Chicago that were zoned differently in 2023 than 2014. That's 0.64% of all parcels.

Of those, I considered 29.5% to be upzones and 23.2% to be downzones. More than a third of the upzones happened in West Town or Logan Square.



West Town leads the pack for upzones in large part because a four-block stretch of Grand Ave just north of the Kinzie Industrial Corridor was rezoned from light manufacturing to denser business and commercial in 2014.

Check out this fascinating 1946 map from a never-finished Chicago comprehensive plan. Among other things, it shows proposed expressways and new community area boundaries. Laying those features over a modern map makes for an interesting comparison. 🧵

The vision for the city's expressway network was incredibly expansive. Many were (thankfully) never built, including:
- two crosstown routes, roughly along Cicero and California/Western
- a Stony Island route connecting the Bishop Ford to DLSD
- Extensions on both ends of DLSD

I generated a population heat map for Chicago using a cool dataset that places people inside residential building footprints rather than census blocks. This yields a much more realistic view of population density. Lots of interesting things to observe. (1/6) This pocket of Streeterville ⬇️ has the highest population density in the city, followed by Gold Coast, Lakeshore East, and South Loop. Next after that is a long and narrow strip from Lakeview to Uptown along the lakefront. (2/6)