Car owner, avid cyclist, and bike share user here. I live in Chicago. Driving is still a necessity, unless you want to spend your life wholly in the city. Sur

Car owner, avid cyclist, and bike share user here. I live in Chicago. Driving is still a necessity, unless you want to spend your life wholly in the city. Sure, there are rental options, here and there, but for someone like me who leaves almost every weekend, there's not a much better option financially than a few years old used car. I almost never use my car for in city trips, it's primary purpose is to drive my bike(s) to places worth riding them. Bike share is great for getting home from the bar. It's too far to commute via bike share for me (~11 miles) without having to stop and exchange bikes to meet the time limit, so I ride my own bike to work every day. I'm pretty fast, as someone who's been an off and on racer most of my life, and my normal non-racer friends that commute much shorter distances on the bike share bikes (like 4 miles, from the loop to wicker park) tell me they occasionally go over the half hour limit as well. I think doubling the limit to an hour would dramatically increase the utilization of the divvy bikes. Which would then be a problem, as access to them seems almost perfectly balanced now (although the largest problem I have when using them is finding an open place to drop them off). The bike share infrastructure is very dependent on large vehicles moving bikes around, because of the rush hour problem - everyone's taking from the same places and dropping off at the same places. All that is to say, Bike share is nice, but it's one piece of a much larger problem that public transit works to solve. The single biggest thing I believe would help the transit situation is more office buildings with free showers that allowed people to bring their bikes inside. Not having to worry about being smelly, or getting your bike stolen would in my experience double the number of bike commuters.