Toronto looks to personalize mass transit

Bixi, Montreal's home-grown bike share system, turned some heads during a demo in Toronto

By Andrew Serba

Even diehard cyclist Paulette Plais would, at times, prefer not to pedal at least one way on her trip to work. The Toronto Cycling Advisory Committee (TCAC) member admits that an uphill ride to a business meeting, for example, may not leave a cyclist in the best shape to make a good first impression.

“I had a meeting at Eglinton and Yonge and I live at Bloor and Ossington. To get to my meeting I don’t want to get all sweaty and go up the Eglinton hill,” she said. “I would be very happy to take the subway up there, have my meeting, get a public bike, ride it down hill (and) then lock it at Bloor and Ossington. That would work perfectly for me.”

Blais’ perfect trip could soon become commonplace in Toronto with the adoption of a public bike-sharing program. Councillor Adrian Heaps, chair of TCAC, said that by the end of this he hopes to announce a pilot project that can be rolled out in Toronto in the spring of 2009.

Here’s how it would work: Users pay a monthly fee to borrow a bike from one of many stations located around the city. They are then free to make their trip and drop the bike off at any other station with available space. Stations are fully automated and trips under 30 minutes are free. The user incurs a small fee after the second half-hour and the fee will double each additional hour the trip lasts. This fee structure ensures the bikes will be used for trips between stations, rather than as rental bikes for tourists to sightsee on.

Heaps said that Toronto is in the enviable position of learning from programs already running in major cities. Paris and London have already made bikes a form of personalized mass public transit via bike sharing. Montreal is set to follow with a flashy system designed and implemented by its parking authority.

The Toronto model will reflect “the best of what’s out there,” Heaps said.

In Heaps’s view, the most convincing argument for a bike-share program is the resulting decrease in car trips. The program should also improve the health of its users, ease congestion and reduce pollution, he said.

Herb van den Dool of the Community Bicycle Network said that personalized mass transit with no waiting times, unfettered by the need to follow a set of rails, will also offer commuters new opportunities.

“Once you free people up from just using a bus route or a subway there’s a lot of freedom in that,” he said.

Fred Sztabinski, also a member of TCAC, endorses a bike sharing plan. It can “increase the viability of transit for a lot of people,” he said. “People for who that last mile or that first mile are not great.” Public bikes, he said, can fill in gaps left by other modes of transit. Trips that would otherwise begin or end too far from a bus or subway route can now be completed entirely on public transit – with bikes forming the missing links.

Proponents of the plan agree that critical masses of bikes and stations need to be achieved to make bike sharing convenient enough for people to adopt.
While Blais likes the idea of a public bike program, she does not think that Toronto’s cycling culture or infrastructure can support a massive influx of bikes.

“To be a cyclist in Toronto you have to be a bit of a maverick; you have to be willing to be brave in traffic,” she said. “If we’re talking about people jumping on a bike-share bike and going to a meeting from one downtown office to another, you’re looking at Bay Street, Union Station, University Avenue, King, Queen, all those streets which, now, none of them are that great for cycling.”

Heaps believes that safety is a top priority. He is exploring the possibility of making bike helmets available to the program’s users, he said. He added that putting the right infrastructure in place is also high on the agenda.

Sztabinski thinks it “would be very symbolic for the city to invest in this and it would show a commitment (to cycling).” He thinks the program could raise the profile of cycling as transit and change the cycling culture in Toronto. He also noted that with more bikes on the road cyclists would find safety in numbers. As the number of cyclists using a city’s roads increases, the rate of collisions and serious injuries tends to drop, he said.

On the other hand, Blais said that a safe biking environment and a culture accepting of bikes should precede a bike-share program. She described Montreal as a city “ripe” for public bike sharing. With excellent east-west corridors through the city and bike paths that are often separated from car traffic by physical barriers, she described Montreal as a city with critical masses of infrastructure and bike users. This increases the likelihood of a public bike program’s success, in Blais’ view.

“Montreal has an incredibly high rate of bike usage,” she said. “You can easily be on a bike path with 10 or 12 bikes at any time of the day or night. People (in Montreal) just use bikes so much.”

According to van den Dool, infrastructure is an important but separate issue. More and better bike paths would make cycling feel safer, more convenient and faster, but he thinks people will still embrace a public bike program.

Heaps said that if a pilot program were brought out in 2009, it would probably focus on the downtown core to secure “the best and most immediate chance of success.” He suggested that downtown parking lots could be the initial sites for bike stations and said that the program would expand as payment and maintenance issues are improved and demand for public bikes grows.