A down­side looms over bike share suc­cess

This article was written by Matt Elliott and was published in the Toronto Star on December 9, 2025.

Bike Share Toronto is rid­ing high. With more than 1,000 sta­tions and 10,000 bikes now in the sys­tem, rider­ship is expec­ted to hit 8.1 mil­lion trips this year. It’ll be another all­time high: a 17 per cent increase over last year and more than three times higher than the pre­pan­demic num­ber of rides in 2019.

And so the Toronto Park­ing Author­ity (TPA), oper­at­ors of the ser­vice, are like proud par­ents at a school Christ­mas con­cert, gush­ing about the per­form­ance of the pro­gram they’ve nur­tured since infancy. In a report set to go before its recently recon­sti­t­uted board this Fri­day, the TPA says Bike Share has “exceeded our per­form­ance expect­a­tions” and is “well posi­tioned to be scaled at an accel­er­ated rate and become an indis­pens­able mode of trans­port­a­tion for the city.”

Des­pite the effus­ive praise, the TPA’s latest report left me wor­ried about Bike Share’s future. Decisions are loom­ing that could stop the rid­ing­high momentum — and maybe even put a pro­ver­bial stick in the spokes of the city’s biggest recent cyc­ling suc­cess story.

Here’s the prob­lem. The TPA report, after jus­ti­fi­ably brag­ging about its recent suc­cess, spends much of the rest of the doc­u­ment lay­ing out ways to extract more money from the Bike Share riders who have con­trib­uted to that suc­cess.

That includes “new rev­enue streams” like “loy­alty pro­grams, digital advert­ising net­works, fea­ture upsells and advanced reser­va­tions.” It reads like a road map that could eas­ily lead to what the tech writer Cory Doc­torow has col­our­fully called “enshit­ti­fic­a­tion” — the pro­cess whereby online plat­forms and ser­vices decline over time as they change from focus­ing on what bene­fits users to what bene­fits their bot­tom line.

You know it when you see it. It usu­ally starts when a ser­vice that pre­vi­ously offered a reas­on­able price and a good user exper­i­ence begins con­stantly try­ing to sell you on their Premium Extra VIP Plus pro­gram while also show­ing unskip­pable ads for weight­loss drugs.

This decline can be an insi­di­ous pro­cess that starts with good inten­tions. For instance, Bike Share has had prob­lems with dock and bike avail­ab­il­ity, espe­cially at peak times of day. From the TPA’s per­spect­ive, allow­ing people to reserve a bike in advance for a small fee might seem like a good way to ease frus­tra­tion. For users, however, a much bet­ter approach would be to add more bikes and docks in areas with high demand.

But that wouldn’t cre­ate a new rev­enue stream, and rev­enue seems to be the TPA’s prime dir­ect­ive. As another example, the report also spends a lot of time talk­ing about the expan­sion of elec­tric bikes across the city. It’s hop­ing to expand the num­ber of elec­tric char­ging docks from about 1,375 today to 3,035 in 2030.

Sounds like good news for those of us who break a sweat try­ing to bike uphill and like the assist offered by e­bikes, but it’s impossible to miss that part of the motiv­a­tion here seems to be to shift more riders to a price­per­minute model.

Under Bike Share’s cur­rent model, mem­bers who pay the basic $105 a year fee can take an unlim­ited num­ber of rides of 30 minutes or less using the pedal­powered bikes for no extra cost. The e­bikes, on the other hand, cost mem­bers 10 cents per minute on top of the annual fee.

The TPA’s report says, rather bluntly, that this means the e­bikes are “more pro­duct­ive” than the pedal bikes, and more e­bikes will help bring the per­ride sub­sidy down from about 39 cents a ride today to close to break­even in 2030.

But the report doesn’t spend much time con­sid­er­ing whether break­even should really be the goal, espe­cially in the near term.

It’s import­ant to remem­ber that the per­ride sub­sidy per Bike Share today is already much lower than the $2.62 per­trip sub­sidy the TTC repor­ted last year. Every Bike Share trip that replaces a transit trip is money saved for city hall.

And while it’s hard to pin down the total value of vari­ous pub­lic sub­sidies spent to bene­fit drivers in the GTA, we know it’s a heck of a lot. As a point of com­par­ison, the $3.6 bil­lion being spent on rehab­il­it­at­ing the Gardiner Express­way — just one of the many high­way projects receiv­ing bil­lions of dol­lars these days — would cover Bike Share’s annual expan­sion budget for about 450 years. Good enough for our great­grand­chil­dren and their great­grand­chil­dren — and prob­ably some cyborg and xeno­morph cyc­lists too.

Given the low costs rel­at­ive to its trans­port­a­tion peers, it’s not clear to me why Bike Share should need to focus on rev­enue gen­er­a­tion and break­even oper­a­tions when other forms of mobil­ity are treated like pub­lic ser­vices worthy of con­tin­ued pub­lic invest­ment.

There’s still time to shift gears. Last month, Mayor Olivia Chow was suc­cess­ful with a sur­prise motion to get Toronto coun­cil to dis­band the TPA board. Gone are the law­yers, eco­nom­ists and account­ants. In their place is an interim board made up entirely of city hall staffers like city man­ager Paul John­son. I hope the new board’s exper­i­ence as pub­lic ser­vants leads them to recon­sider Bike Share’s long­term goals — and to ask whether it really makes sense for it to oper­ate like a tech plat­form chas­ing extra rev­enue.

Bike Share has incred­ible momentum. It’d be a shame if its remark­able ride were spoiled by rolling into a haz­ard ahead, like a pile of, uh, well, you know.