Few US cities were supposed to make micromobility work. The default assumption, even among operators and investors, was that American car-centric design made shared bikes and scooters a European story. Chicago is dismantling that assumption one ride at a time.

In this episode of the Micromobility Podcast, Prabin Joel Jones sits down with David Powe, Assistant Commissioner at the Chicago Department of Transportation, where he leads the city's micromobility programmes including Divvy Bike Share, Lime Scooter Operations, and the Bike Chicago initiative. Powe also serves on the board of NAPSA. He studied transport and city planning at UCL in London, worked across commuter rail and bus rapid transit projects in the United States, and has not owned a car since moving to Chicago. He lays out exactly how a city that most people would not have picked as a micromobility leader quietly became one.

From 600k to 6.1M scooter trips in three years

The numbers are difficult to ignore. In 2025 alone, Chicago recorded 12.9m shared micromobility trips across its two systems, roughly 20% growth year over year despite the city's population actually shrinking. Lime's scooter operation tells the sharper story. Approximately 600k trips in 2022 grew to 6.1m in 2025, a tenfold increase in three years, achieved while competing operators exited the market entirely.

Powe's explanation is structural rather than luck. Chicago is a flat grid city shaped roughly like a backwards D along its lakefront, with density concentrated near the water and declining rapidly further out. That geography makes cycling unusually accessible. The city now has over 500 miles of bikeways across a 4k mile road network, and from 2020 to 2024, overall biking in the city increased by 118%.

The infrastructure bet that paid off

The argument Powe makes is one that city officials in Paris and London have made before him. Build the infrastructure first and the riders follow. During the pandemic, Chicago accelerated a programme of upgrading painted bike lanes to protected lanes using precast concrete curbs, a quick-build approach that allowed rapid rollout without prohibitive cost.

A city council ordinance passed roughly two years ago now requires that whenever a road is resurfaced, the city must evaluate incorporating complete streets measures including bikeways, raised curbs, and bus infrastructure. This has allowed meaningful expansion of safe cycling infrastructure without requiring new budget lines or tax increases.

The Divvy system has followed a goal of four stations per square mile across the city. Chicago is approaching that target and now focusing on the densest corridors, which could support 16 to 40 stations per square mile. In 2024, Lyft and the city added over 140 new stations, primarily in high-density areas and near lakefront beaches. A further 200 locations are targeted for new or upgraded stations in 2025.

How pricing and public investment drive ridership

Powe is candid about the role of public dollars. The city has put funding into the Divvy system specifically to hold prices down. Annual membership has been kept flat for three consecutive years and is targeted to stay that way into a fourth year and beyond. A 99 dollar introductory membership was launched for new or returning members against a standard price of 143 dollars. The Divvy for Everyone programme offers a 5 dollar annual membership with 50 to 75% off all products for low-income residents.

For members, the first 45 minutes on a pedal bike is included at no extra cost. Lime offers a 50% discount in the city's designated equity priority areas, neighbourhoods that have faced economic hardship, housing pressures, and transit gaps. Powe's position is that the e-bike and the scooter are public goods as much as commercial products, and pricing policy should reflect that.

The electrification shift

Pedal bike trips on Divvy are declining as a share of total ridership, and Powe's team has a clear theory about why. Chicago's core Divvy users are nine-to-five commuters travelling to office jobs downtown, often dressed for work, and e-bikes remove the sweat problem that pedal cycling creates. The current split sits at approximately 60 to 70% e-bikes and 20 to 30% pedal bikes on Divvy, with scooters accounting for roughly 15 to 20% of all Divvy trips.

Powe is not abandoning pedal bikes. They remain the cheapest micromobility option in the city after walking, and there are no plans to remove them. But the fleet composition is shifting in a meaningful direction. Q1 2026 e-bike trips on Divvy rose 20% year over year against overall Divvy growth of nearly 12%, while Lime's scooter growth in the same period did not keep the same pace. Powe's read is that e-bike growth is accelerating and scooter growth may be plateauing.

How Lime took over Chicago's scooter market

The scooter market consolidation in Chicago was not planned. Three operators, Lime, Spin, and Superpedestrian, launched under a business licence framework that required operators to have already demonstrated operations at scale in comparable North American cities. Fleet growth was earned through compliance milestones rather than granted upfront. Operators started at a set threshold and could grow in increments of 500 to 1k vehicles by meeting requirements around 311 service complaint resolution times, sidewalk riding detection deployment, and payment compliance.

Lime earned the right to operate up to 11.5k vehicles by meeting those thresholds faster than its competitors. The other operators failed to grow fast enough and eventually exited. Lime also benefited from a geographic dynamic that worked in its favour. A zone of exclusivity gives Lyft priority rights in its core operating area, so Lime focused on the rest of the city and built ridership in areas where Divvy's station network was thinner. The result was meteoric growth without a direct confrontation with the established operator.

Sidewalk detection without cameras

One of the more technically specific conversations in the episode covers Chicago's sidewalk riding detection system. Powe is clear that the technology does not use cameras. It uses motion sensors and vibration detectors, likely mounted in one of the wheels, that pick up the regular expansion joints in Chicago's concrete sidewalks, which occur every five feet. Asphalt roadways do not have those joints and produce a different vibration signature, which is how the system distinguishes between the two surfaces.

The system has its limits. Marble and granite plazas confuse it. Ice, salt, and snow degrade performance in winter. Concrete bus pads on asphalt streets create false positives. For this reason, the city has not mandated automatic vehicle halting when sidewalk riding is detected, given the safety risk of stopping a scooter mid-street. Instead, the system triggers a verbal warning from the scooter itself, followed by an in-app alert and an email notification. Repeat violations result in fines, then suspension, then removal from the platform. Powe puts the overall effectiveness at roughly nine out of ten. Out-of-station parking fees for Divvy were also raised this year from 1 dollar 30 cents to 2 dollars, a deliberate economic nudge to push users toward docking correctly.

The Bike Chicago programme

Bike Chicago is a city-run programme that distributes free bicycles, helmets, and basic cycling education to low-income residents. It was designed to put equipment directly into the hands of people who might otherwise have no practical way to use the city's expanding bikeways network, including undocumented residents and those without sufficient income. Proof of income below a set threshold is the only requirement.

The city has given away approximately 4.5k to 4.7k bikes to date. When the programme opened its most recent lottery, 20k people applied for 5k bikes in the first week. The programme costs roughly 500 dollars per person including all equipment and programme management. A satisfaction survey found 99% of recipients were happy with the results, and the vast majority are still riding.

The safety frontier

Powe identifies two problems in Chicago's micromobility safety landscape that remain genuinely unsolved. The first is age verification. The second is tandem riding. A recent incident in which a 15-year-old and a 16-year-old were riding a shared scooter together resulted in a fatality, and the city is now working with both Lime and Lyft to prevent it from happening again.

Age verification is technically hard. Children use parents' IDs and credit cards to create accounts, and distinguishing a genuine adult account from a fraudulent one at scale is a challenge that cities and operators around the world have not cracked. Tandem riding, two or sometimes three people on a single scooter, is equally difficult to detect without creating thresholds that could be discriminatory based on weight or body size. Chicago has launched a scooter safety campaign covering helmet use, bike lane compliance, correct age requirements, and single-rider rules. Powe believes hardware-level tandem detection may ultimately require federal or state regulation rather than city-level action alone.

The city Chicago is chasing

The internal benchmark Powe's team has set for itself is Montreal. A standing weekly meeting between CDOT and the Lyft team is called Operation Beat Montreal. Montreal's ridership per capita is roughly eight times higher than Chicago's. Stations are spaced every block. The system is removed in winter and stored to protect equipment from salt and snow damage. A recently introduced cargo bike trailer programme has drawn particular admiration from Powe and his team, who follow Montreal's developments closely enough that they translate French-language updates from the city's website.

Montreal's lead, in Powe's view, comes from sustained public operating subsidy at a level most American cities would not consider. Chicago's goal is to build a comparable public funding model. That, Powe says, is what Chicagoans deserve, and it is what his team is working toward.