So I joined Bikeshare mostly out of spite (a squeaky wheel in the neighborhood is trying to get a Bikeshare station removed from a park). I think it's $50 for a year if you have a presto card.
I've used it 10 times so far, so I guess that's $5 a trip and falling quickly. It's been handy when I've had a flat tire, or do a 1-way trip (for example bike into work, TTC home).
The bikes are worse to use than I thought. The seat is height-adjustable, but the handlebars are too low for me. The gearing is low so I just leave it in "3" the whole time. Brakes are phenomenal. Ride is cushy. I wouldn't want to ride one for much more than 4 or 5 km, but then again most of my trips are 3km anyway.
Back when I had a membership that was my usage scenario too, 1-way trips. A lot of times in the core wanting to take a pretty short trip somewhere didn't have a direct TTC route that would save time vs walking, so bikeshare saved me a bit of time vs walking. Also, a lot of times I'd have a streetcar short turn with a huge crowd and a long wait for the next one, or service would be suspended/detouring altogether...in those cases I no longer had to weigh my options or think about anything, I'd just hop on bikeshare, either to an in-service TTC route or to my destination if I was already close.
I'm not an avid cyclist or especially fit so I actually find the gearing good. When I was using them regularly and got into the habit of it I found 3 pretty comfortable but a little high effort. The ride/suspension was great, I agree with you there, just I found the seat cushions to be absolute murder--I actually found a little gel seat cover at Canadian Tire that I carried around in my bag if I expected to potentially take a longer trip, which took the edge off. Agreed, also, about the handlebars/some of the overall proportions of the bike, but one-size-fits-all has those limitations.
Definitely a useful service. I got the membership because there was a $50 annual groupbuy deal, when they stopped doing those and it went back to $90
and cut the monthly membership I said no way, and let them know I found cutting the monthly membership especially ridiculous. That said, the Presto option is great, but they don't offer it to existing members and $50 is for the first year only, so they'll never see me subscribing to a membership in the future. I've gotten a day pass once in a blue moon, and that's all.
The Transit App integration is another big plus recently--it's great to just press a button in the app, have my saved credit card billed $7, and get a ride code, and not spend 10 minutes fiddling with the kiosk screen, although the new ones look WAY better than the awfully slow and unreadable-in-sunlight old ones.
