Tag: biking

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.

Expan­sion draws new riders as agency seeks to bridge `first and last mile’ gap

This article was written by Andy Takagi and was published in the Toronto Star on October 13, 2025.

Above a park­ing lot in an unas­sum­ing down­town office build­ing sits one of Toronto’s few­-and-­far-between transit suc­cess stor­ies.

But it has noth­ing to do with planes, trains or auto­mo­biles. Here, they hawk something dif­fer­ent: bicycles.

As con­ten­tious as cyc­ling has been in the down­town core, with Premier Doug Ford crack­ing down on cycle­ways along major arter­ial streets, Toronto’s bike share pro­gram has been quietly shat­ter­ing rider­ship records.

The pro­gram, which was on death’s door just over a dec­ade ago, has since become one of the fast­est­grow­ing bike share pro­grams in North Amer­ica.

Toronto­n­ians, grap­pling with con­ges­tion­rid­den streets and a TTC sys­tem plagued by delays, have increas­ingly turned to the city’s bike share net­work to get around.

In Septem­ber alone, Toronto­n­ians took more than one mil­lion trips via the orange bikes that dot the city­scape. That’s a ride for every third per­son liv­ing in the city of Toronto.

The agency in charge of Toronto’s bike share pro­gram isn’t the TTC or Met­rolinx, the city’s and the province’s sprawl­ing transit agen­cies, which have struggled to bring back pre­pan­demic rider­ship and deliver on new lines, such as the Eglin­ton Crosstown.

Instead, Toronto Bike Share has found a unique home with the Toronto Park­ing Author­ity (TPA), an agency a frac­tion of the size of the TTC and Met­rolinx.

Even though park­ing has been the core of the TPA’s busi­ness for 73 years, “we’re about provid­ing mobil­ity solu­tions for people, help­ing people, in par­tic­u­lar, in that first and last mile,” said Jar­rett McDon­ald, the park­ing author­ity’s vice­pres­id­ent of oper­a­tions.

Bike Share is one of the city’s “real trans­port­a­tion suc­cess stor­ies,” said Michael Long­field, exec­ut­ive dir­ector of Cycle Toronto, the advocacy group that took the Ford gov­ern­ment to court over its bike lane legis­la­tion.

McDon­ald and the TPA aren’t rest­ing on their laurels. In a wider­anging inter­view with the Star, McDon­ald hin­ted that the future of Bike Share could include new bike attach­ments, bet­ter bike main­ten­ance and a redis­tri­bu­tion pro­gram.

That all depends, however, on how the loom­ing threat of the Ford gov­ern­ment’s bike lane policies plays out.

Toronto Bike Share, ori­gin­ally called Bixi Toronto, began in 2011 with 80 sta­tions, 1,000 bicycles and a mea­gre few Toronto bike lanes.

It failed at first, when the private com­pany spear­head­ing the pro­gram declared bank­ruptcy.

A con­fid­en­tial city report obtained by the Star back in 2013 found Bixi was “insolv­ent or immin­ently insolv­ent due to the fact that rev­en­ues gen­er­ated by the sys­tem have not been suf­fi­cient to cover costs.”

Bike Share in Toronto nearly died that year under former mayor Rob Ford, who declared the pro­gram a “fail­ure” and said it “should be dis­solved. It’s not work­ing.”

The pro­gram nearly found a home with the TTC, but instead was saved by sac­ri­fi­cing funds meant for a self­clean­ing pub­lic toi­lets pro­gram.

Money meant for 20 high­tech pub­lic toi­lets — dif­fi­cult to install and sparsely used — was instead used to buy out Bixi in 2013.

In 2014, the Toronto Park­ing Author­ity became the unlikely home for the bike share pro­gram, where it relaunched as Bike Share Toronto with a spon­sor­ship from TD Bank to help cover its oper­a­tional costs. Bike Share switched spon­sors in 2023 to part­ner with Tan­ger­ine bank, turn­ing the famil­iar green bikes a bright orange.

As TTC rider­ship cratered dur­ing the pan­demic and most non­essen­tial work­ers moved their office setups into their homes, Bike Share rider­ship and the num­ber of sta­tions boomed.

From its ini­tial 80 sta­tions in 2011, Bike Share has grown 12­fold, with 992 sta­tions across the city’s 25 wards as of Septem­ber.

The pro­gram has taken advant­age of grow­ing bike lane infra­struc­ture that pro­lif­er­ated throughout the city dur­ing the pan­demic, but Bike Share has also bet on growth in parts of the city that lack safe­guards for cyc­lists.

Even at the outer edges of the city, where cars have tra­di­tion­ally reigned and bik­ing infra­struc­ture is sparse or non­exist­ent, you can find a Bike Share dock.

“You have to put the bikes in places to cre­ate the demand,” McDon­ald said. “If it’s not there, no one’s ever going to use it.”

It’s about indu­cing people to take up bik­ing, he explained, adding, “We will con­tinue to do that because what we’ve found is when we put (docks) in those loc­a­tions, we do start to see increased demand.”

Bike Share has been such a boon that it has even helped off­set a weak year for the park­ing side of the busi­ness, which took a hit thanks to Feb­ru­ary’s his­toric snowstorm. Rider­ship, for the first time ever, crossed one mil­lion riders for three con­sec­ut­ive months, in July, August and Septem­ber of this year.

Just this sum­mer, the Toronto Islands’ Bike Share pro­gram, which launched in May, net­ted the TPA $1.4 mil­lion. Even in the winter, when rider­ship tra­di­tion­ally dips, there have been at least 100,000 riders per month for the past three years.

McDon­ald said a large part of Bike Share’s recent suc­cess has been filling the “first­ and last­mile” gap — essen­tially, mar­ket­ing toward riders who might take a bicycle from the train sta­tion or a park­ing lot.

“A big chunk of the lead­er­ship team here actu­ally doesn’t drive to work. They drive to a park­ing lot, take transit, jump on a bike, or do vari­ous com­bin­a­tions of that,” McDon­ald said.

Long­field agreed, adding, “I think Bike Share really does help show people that a lot of short local trips are really prac­tical by bike.”

E­bikes, which were rolled out in 2020, have also been integ­ral to Bike Share’s rise.

“Two in every three people will pick an e­bike, if it’s avail­able,” McDon­ald said. “And the e­bike has brought in new cus­tom­ers, new com­munity mem­bers who didn’t think that bike share was an option for them.”

There’s one glar­ing bump in the road ahead for bike share: the pro­vin­cial gov­ern­ment’s battle with bike lanes.

Ford has, for more than a year, tar­geted bike lanes run­ning throughout the city, blam­ing them for con­ges­tion. He sought to remove bike lanes on Bloor Street, Uni­versity Avenue and Yonge Street via legis­la­tion, which was chal­lenged in court by cyc­ling advoc­ates. The advoc­ates, includ­ing the group Cycle Toronto, argued the Ford gov­ern­ment’s bill viol­ated their Charter rights to life and secur­ity of per­son.

The pro­vin­cial gov­ern­ment’s attempt to remove bike lanes on the three streets was ruled uncon­sti­tu­tional by Super­ior Court Justice Paul Schabas in July.

The gov­ern­ment said it would appeal but, in the mean­time, the bike lanes can­not be removed.

“Def­in­itely, it goes into the cal­cu­lus (of Bike Share’s future),” McDon­ald said. “We know from the stud­ies we’ve done with our cus­tom­ers that one of the biggest bar­ri­ers to get­ting on a bike is feel­ing safe.

“What we need to do is con­vince them that it is a safe option in the right place at the right time,” he said. “And because you get to choose how you use the bike and where you use the bike, you can make it safe.”

Long­field, who has opposed Ford’s bike lane legis­la­tion in the courts and extens­ively in the media, sees Bike Share’s rise going hand in hand with the expan­sion of the city’s bike lane net­work.

“You can see object­ively, with the num­ber of trips that have been going up with Bike Share, month over month, year after year, that it really does speak to more people cyc­ling as more sta­tions have grown along the cyc­ling net­work plan expan­sion,” Long­field said.

But McDon­ald couched his con­cerns and added he doesn’t think Ford’s efforts to remove a major por­tion of Toronto’s bike lanes would “sig­ni­fic­antly” change the over­all plan for Toronto Bike Share.

For McDon­ald, the future of Bike Share is bright. New and improved docks are being piloted at three sta­tions, with bet­ter indic­at­ors for broken bikes, a tap option for those with a mem­ber­ship card, and easier dock­ing (so users don’t slam bikes in).

The nas­cent transit organ­iz­a­tion is draw­ing from examples across the world.

McDon­ald said Bike Share is look­ing at rep­lic­at­ing the “bike angels” pro­gram of New York’s Cit­iBikes, where users get rewards for redis­trib­ut­ing bicycles from crowded sta­tions, a prob­lem that has plagued Bike Share as the trucks it cur­rently uses, iron­ic­ally, often get caught in traffic.

He also looks for inspir­a­tion to Montreal, where cyc­lists can rent out cargo attach­ments as well.

And Bike Share still has a ways to go to draw in riders. Des­pite hav­ing a smal­ler pop­u­la­tion, Montreal, with its expans­ive bike lane net­work, is doub­ling Toronto’s rider­ship on its bike share sys­tem.

“I think that’s a real­istic hope for 20 years from now, that every­body in the city of Toronto sees Bike Share like they see the TTC or the GO train, as an option to move,” McDon­ald said.

“The best option is to make it seam­less and easy for people, and when you remove those bar­ri­ers, people will try things that they nor­mally wouldn’t do.”