Bike Share Toronto rolls into the big time with major expansion

Bike Share Toronto has begun an expansion that will see it more than double in size, a move that experts say is key to ensuring its long-term sustainability.

Thestar.com
July 5, 2016
By Ben Spurr

The past five years have been a bumpy ride for Toronto’s fledgling cycle-share program. Since its launch in 2011,the system has endured the collapse of its parent company, a failed expansion attempt, and a rebranding.

At one point its finances were so shaky it had to be rescued by a deal that leveraged the value of self-cleaning public toilets.

But last month Bike Share Toronto launched an expansion that will see it more than double in size, a move that experts say is key to ensuring its long-term sustainability. After years of uncertainty, Bike Share may finally be rolling on stable ground.

“Two years ago, this was not our story,” admitted Marie Casista, a vice-president of the Toronto Parking Authority, which oversees Bike Share. She said the expansion will create “a meaningful alternate method of transportation that covers a wide city area” and the agency is expecting significant growth in ridership.

The program currently has over 4,000 annual members and 35,000 casual users, and last year logged 667,000 rides.

The expansion is the first in Bike Share’s history and will cost about $6 million, Casista said. By this month it will add 1,000 bicycles and 120 stations to the program, which has been stuck at 1,000 vehicles and 80 stations since its inception. The network will extend as far as Dundas and Bloor Sts. in the west, just south of St. Clair Ave. in the north, and Main St. in the east.

“I think it’s exciting, it’s long overdue,” said Cycle Toronto executive director Jared Kolb. “It’s something that I think will enhance ridership and the overall vibrancy of the system.”

Kolb said that the experience in other cities demonstrates that cycle-share’s success is predicated on having a network that’s wide and dense enough to offer customers maximum convenience.

“When you’re on the streets of New York, or in Montreal, part of the reason why it works so well is you just don’t have to think about where the nearest bike share station is, because they’re at virtually every corner,” he said.

Most of Bike Share’s expansion is being paid for using $4 million from Metrolinx, the provincial transit agency. The rest of the money will come from reserves, which include contributions from private developers, Casista said. Stations will be added to high-demand downtown areas already served by Bike Share, as well as at transit stops on the subway line and GO network.

The investment in cycling is minuscule for Metrolinx, which is the midst of a multibillion-dollar build-out of public transit in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. But Metrolinx chief planning officer Leslie Woo said the cycle-share system has “transformational” potential because it can provide important links at the beginning and end of transit trips.

“It’s small but mighty, that’s how I would describe it,” she said. “Now more than ever, as we are expanding investments in (public transit), one of the critical pieces is making sure that we have lots of options to connect to that transit.”

Although the expansion is a milestone for Toronto’s program, by the time it’s complete, Bike Share will still lag behind other cities’ systems. The Bixi program in Montreal, a city with one million fewer residents than Toronto, boasts 5,200 bikes and 460 stations.

And though Casista says Bike Share has improved its customer experience, it’s not immune major malfunctions. In June, a planned three-day system-wide shutdown to replace station technology in preparation for the expansion lasted a week, leaving customers fuming.

Yet not long ago, Bike Share looked like it wouldn’t survive to see its fifth year, let alone have the potential to expand.

The program came to Toronto in May, 2011 as Bixi, an offshoot of Montreal’s Public Bike System Co. (PBSC), a company created through the Montreal’s parking authority.

Early on, there were warnings that Toronto might not find its foray into bike-sharing smooth riding. Just 10 days after the launch ceremony in downtown Toronto, Montreal was forced to give PBSC a $108-million bailout after an auditor general’s investigation discovered the company was awash in debt.

By 2013 it was clear that the Toronto program’s business model was fatally flawed. Its revenues weren’t enough break even on its $1.5 million in operating expenses, let alone to pay down its $4.8 million starter loan. Because the loan had been guaranteed by the city, it appeared taxpayers were going to have to pay millions for a bungled experiment.

A political battle ensued, with then-mayor Rob Ford branding Bixi a “failure” and calling for its dissolution. TTC chair Karen Stintz floated the idea of the transit agency taking over the program, but that would have required a public subsidy, an idea that had little support on council.

Enter Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, who was public works chair at the time. He uncovered an unexpected source of funds to bail out Bixi: public toilets.

The city had a street furniture contract with Bell Astral Media under which the company was supposed to build 20 self-cleaning public toilets throughout Toronto. The toilets were difficult to install and not well-used, and their $450,000 price tag criticized by many as a waste of money.

Minnan-Wong suggested relieving Bell of the obligation to build some of the commodes if the company wrote the city a cheque big enough to buy out Bixi. The deal was finalized in December 2013, and allowed the city to rescue program without going back to the taxpayers.

Bixi relaunched as Bike Share Toronto the following spring, and months later secured a sponsorship from TD Bank to cover its operation costs. The sponsorship expires at the end of October, but Casista said she’s optimistic it will be renewed.

In hindsight, Minnan-Wong believes the city rushed to embrace bike-sharing because was the “flavour of the month,” but no one took the time to scrutinize Bixi’s finances.

“Paris had it, so if Paris had to have it, we had to have it too,” Minnan-Wong said in an interview.

Once the program started it proved too popular to let die, however. Minnan-Wong described using a private sponsorship to fund its operation as an ideal solution because “a lot of people would say that subsidizing cycling is not a core service” the city should provide.

Bike Share’s winding path toward stability mirrors the trajectory of other North American cycle-share programs, all of which are less than 10 years old. Tulsa, Okla. claims to have opened the first system in 2007, and although they proliferated during the early part of the 2010s, many struggled to find a viable financial model.

The industry was hit hard in 2014 when Montreal’s PBSC declared bankruptcy. The company was the major supplier of bike-share infrastructure and software on the continent, and when it went under several cities, including Toronto, found they couldn’t replace worn-out parts or buy new ones for expansion. Last year, a Bike Share expansion planned to coincide with the Pan Am Games had to be shelved because the parking authority couldn’t find a company to build stations to its specifications.

According to Paul DeMaio, principal at the Washington, D.C.-based MetroBike consultant firm, the industry has since rebounded. New vendors sprang up to fill the void left by PBSC, and the insolvent company was purchased by a real estate developer and relaunched in 2015 as PBSC Urban Solutions. The company now supplies bike-share components to Toronto and 14 other cities around the world.

There are 100 cycle share programs in operation on the continent, according to the Bike-Sharing World Map website. DeMaio said there is no standard model - some, like New York City’s Citi Bike, are for-profit, while others, like Minneapolis-St. Paul’s Nice Ride, are publicly-supported non-profits.

DeMaio said that no one model is necessarily better than another, but there is one rule of thumb, and it bodes well for Toronto.

“Well certainly the bigger the better. The more stations and the more bikes people have to choose from, means more people will have access . . . to their origins and their destinations,” he said. “So I would put money on Toronto’s system doing even better.”