Summary Report

Executive Summary from the Summary Report released Dec 15, 2008

Bicycle sharing is a form of personalized mass transportation that has the potential to lessen the environmental impacts of transportation, enhance urban mobility and support access and egress to public transport (Ishaque & Noland; DeMaio). According to Councillor Adrian Heaps, the City of Toronto is hoping to launch a public bikesharing program, possibly as early as the summer of 2009, pending a fact-finding mission of the best aspects of programs in other jurisdictions.  Initial public consultation reveals support for the implementation of such a program in Toronto.

On September 18th and 19th, 2008, the Toronto Coalition for Active Transportation, the Clean Air Partnership and the Community Bicycle Network held a community forum and stakeholder roundtable entitled Bikes as a Public Good: What is the future of public bike sharing in Toronto? The aim of this 2-day event was to engage the general public, the cycling community and other stakeholders in discussing the future of this new form of personalized mass transportation in Toronto.

Discussion was initiated with two short film screenings, Bike Share in Paris by Streetfilms and Tina Hahn’s Tales of a Yellow Bike, and a series of presentations: Herb van den Dool on the Community Bicycle Network’s BikeShare program, Alain Ayotte on Stationnement de Montreal’s new Bixi program, Nate Kvamme on Humana’s Freewheelin programs and David Boyce on Veloway transportation’s approach to bicycle sharing. The audience of approximately eighty people unanimously supported the implementation of a new program.

At the stakeholder roundtable, participants concluded that a new program should allow for flexible access and registration options to accommodate low income groups, expand from the downtown core to the suburbs in a two-phase implementation process and target a variety of user groups. They suggested that urban professionals, transit users and tourists would be the target market, that bicycle rental hubs should be integrated with existing and planned mobility hubs and transit infrastructure will be paramount to its’ success.