Buses Are at 86 Percent of 2019. The L Is at 65. Divvy Is at 176.

What the trip files show

January through May 2026: 1,758,230 trips. 70 percent are tagged in the files as member trips, the rest as casual. 69 percent of all trips were on electric bikes — the classic pedal bike, the only kind in the January–May 2019 trip files, now accounts for less than a third of rides. And 20 percent of trips started away from any station at all — “dockless” starts, e-bikes locked to public racks; every trip in the 2019 window started at a dock. Every month of the window beat its 2019 counterpart — May alone ran 653,704 trips against 367,458.

Why this is expansion, not recovery

In the 2019 window, trips started from 610 distinct stations. In the 2026 window, 1,674 distinct start-location names appear in the files — mostly docks, some named racks — plus the dockless starts, and the service map reaches neighborhoods and suburbs it simply did not serve in 2019. So the 176 percent measures two things at once: more trips being taken, and more places to start them from. The trip files cannot split the two apart, and we will not guess. What they can say plainly: on the same five months where the L is still missing one ride in three, the bike system logged about seven trips for every four it logged in 2019.

The train ledger this contrasts with, on the same window: Chicago’s Buses Are Back to 86% of Pre-Pandemic Ridership. The ‘L’ Is at 65%.

Where the rides start

The busiest starting points in the 2026 window: Navy Pier led with 15,512 trips, followed by DuSable Lake Shore Drive & Monroe Street by the lakefront trail, Canal & Madison in the West Loop, University Avenue & 57th Street in Hyde Park, and State & Chicago in River North. A station’s count reflects its docks and its neighborhood’s density as much as anything — these are the system’s front doors, not a ranking of who bikes most.

How we counted

• Windows January 1 through May 31 of 2019 and 2026 — the same matched window as our L-station and bus-route recovery analyses, so the three modes can sit in one sentence honestly.
• The CTA figures The 86 and 65 percent comparisons are our own, from the linked bus-vs-train analysis of the CTA’s daily ridership files (bus routes jyb9-n7fm, L station entries 5neh-572f), same January–May window, retrieved July 19, 2026.
• 2019 source The City of Chicago data portal’s Divvy Trips archive (dataset fg6s-gzvg), which ends in 2019 — counted by aggregation query, retrieved August 2, 2026.
• 2026 source Divvy’s official monthly trip files, published by system operator Lyft at divvy-tripdata (files 202601 through 202605), counted row by row, retrieved August 2, 2026.
• What a trip is One ride from unlock to dock or lock-up. Trips are not riders: one person can take four trips a day, and the files carry no rider identifier. The 2019 and 2026 files come from different archives of the same system, published years apart; both count completed trips.
• The comparison’s limit Divvy’s named start locations nearly tripled between the windows and the e-bike fleet is absent from the 2019 window; the CTA comparison figures measure roughly fixed rail and bus networks. The modes share a window, not a denominator — the page treats Divvy’s number as growth, not recovery, for exactly that reason.

Computed by KCM Desk from the Divvy trip files, retrieved August 2, 2026. If you spot an error, corrections come first.

Related Keep Chicagoland Moving coverage

• Chicago Transit, by the Numbers
• Chicago’s Buses Are Back to 86% of Pre-Pandemic Ridership. The ‘L’ Is at 65%.
• Only Two L Stations Are Busier Than Before the Pandemic. Neither Is Downtown.