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Toronto Bike Share

robmausser said:
Not only is the Bike Share one of the cheapest ways to get around, at $79 for a YEARLY membership (if you keep each ride under 30 minutes) but e-bikes are also a very important part of the cycling system.

While not implemented yet, bike share should and I believe will have e-bikes available, and people can ride their own. Many of your arguments against cycling would be completely mitigated by e-bikes, which are an excellent alternative to cars in a downtown core.
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I still say that the cost is prohibitive for the average high school student to want to bother with a bike rental for a few hours each day. Also not all teachers live close by to the schools they work at some live outside of the city and come into it every day for various reasons.

I thought I saw somewhere that city council was looking at banning e bike's in the city of Toronto do I'm not really sure if bike share would be considering them if that's the case.
 
There are different types of e-bikes. The type that is a motorized scooter and the pedelec type, where you actually pedal and can use e-assist if needed (and variations in between of course).

As for the "build it and they will come" argument, that has proven to be true when it comes to bike lanes. People, particularly women and children, feel safer when there are bike lanes ... whether they are actually safer is a whole other discussion, but given an increased sense of security, they choose to bike more often.

As for the cost, do you see the shoes and cell phones high school students have? For those who can't afford luxuries (and I personally don't think bike share is a luxury), perhaps student rates can be implemented as we do now with TTC. Or low income families could be provided with bike share memberships. I would really like to see integration with Presto to make some of that easier to manage.
 
Don't get me wrong, I would put bike lanes everywhere. But they are just paint and don't provide instant immunity from cars which is why I'd rather see protected infra à la Amsterdam (not à la Sherbourne). With this council, though, anything we get is an ordeal. One of the problems with bike lanes is that drivers often forget the one metre rule still applies, which is why those lanes with the double line of paint are better. And as I mentioned, when there are bike lanes more people ride which normalizes the behaviour and provides an additional level of safety
 
EastYorkTTCFan said:
I still say that the cost is prohibitive for the average high school student to want to bother with a bike rental for a few hours each day. Also not all teachers live close by to the schools they work at some live outside of the city and come into it every day for various reasons.
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$99 per year is prohibitive? (30m trips are free once you pay the annual fee).

That's $8.25 per month!

Or roughly .27c per day in a typical month.
 
EastYorkTTCFan said:
I just don't see high school students or parents of them going for this as a way to get to school.
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We see things differently.

PS Just to point out what I would hope is obvious, but we're talking about a very small percentage of students/faculty to make a station work.

Assuming 14 docks/7 bikes. I would consider it a success if each bike saw 5 trips per day on average.

Of which 2 would occur during school commuting periods, others at lunch and later in the day.

That requires only 35 riders and in fact (if one student/teacher uses it for commuting, that drops to 28 riders, and if one used it to get to/from a lunch site, that drops to as little as little as 14 riders on weekdays.)

That's 14-35 out of a combined student/faculty of about 2,000.

Or not more than 2% uptake makes this quite workable.
 
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Northern Light said:
We see things differently.
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Yes I guess we do but I really think that there needs to be consultation on where bike shares and bike lanes go. For example they recently put in two in my area of the city one is on the side walk and could cause interface with someone in a wheelchair or with a stroller getting by and another is in a random part of a park that other than being near by some apartment buildings and a subway station doesn't make much sense for it's location.
 
EastYorkTTCFan said:
I still say that the cost is prohibitive for the average high school student to want to bother with a bike rental for a few hours each day.
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I drive, I see empty bike lanes in some deep suburbs, and maybe I can see why you shake a fist if you do not witness the bikeshare in a different area.

I need to provide some math 101 corrections to your post.

- my city provides subsidized bikeshare memberships for low income (Hamilton Everyone Rides Initiative)
- average bike rental length by a highschooler is between 8min and 15min here in my city
- Renting is as instant as tapping/inserting a card or punching in a pass code. FIVE SECONDS.
- Rent is instantaneous if you have the annual membership tapcard/insertcard (or memorize code) take any random bike
- Rent Starts when you undock
- Rent Ends when you dock (at ANY dock. Doesnt have to be original dock)
- Unlimited undock/dock. For Toronto, just dock every 30min or less.
- Commuter to school is less than 30min. Just dock at nearest dock to school.
- Some bikeshare systems like my Hamilton SoBi, lets you end rental at any normal bike rack (not official docks) thanks to an electronic U-bar
- DONE.
- High schoolers that I know never had to pay any extra fees. It's just an unlimited cycling pass for one flat annual fee.
- Freedom of One way bike trips! Rent start at undock. Rent ends at school's dock.
- Responsibility ends when you dock at school's dock. So if bikeshare vandalized, you are not responsible
- Take bus home if its raining at end of school day.
- The freedom of not moving a wet dripping bike up 3 floors of apartment
- High school students in Hamilton loves it because of all the above.

"Highschooler needs to rent bike few hours a day" = someone (clap) who (clap) does (clap) not (clap) even (clap) understand (clap) what (clap) a (clap) bikeshare (clap) is.

(no offense)

So, please learn some bikeshare 101.

It's not like going to Hertz Rent-a-Car for Christ's Sake. It's Uber for Bikes.
Uber is simply renting a car+chauffer at a pushbutton.

Bikeshare is the same. It's not really classic "renting" experience because your bikeshare pass card is a skeleton key that unlocks any bike instantly anywhere. See a bike? It's yours baby!

Ever tried a Uber? For simplicity, the bike share app (e.g. like my SoBi Hamilton app), let's call it the "bike hail" app. The bike-hail app will tell you nearest bike stations and will tell you if your destination (school) has stations you can "end" rental at. Grab bike. Ride bike. Lock bike. Done! Forget about the bike, your responsibility ended for the 1way trip. No theft/weather worry for return trip. The return trip is almost always by a different random bikeshare bike anyway. There's no fiddle duddle, the card is the key that instantly unlocks thousands of bikes at your heart's content. (Just lets you unlock one at a time though). Flat annual fee!!! No extra charges if you are under 30min/ride (Toronto) or under 90min/day (Hamilton). Unlimited bike trips all year long! Now you know why bikeshare is like Uber for bikes.

Maybe you dont want it in your city but Please Understand Bikeshare 101

Sure, onetime tourist bikeshare rentals are inconvenient. Maybe you tried and got pissed. But chrissakes, sign up properly like you do with Uber. Then you get that instant unlocker key..... to make bikeshare FUN thereafter!

Or are you an Apple Pay user and prefer to unlock via iPhone? Then you can use the app (to unlock bike with some systems), Transit App can unlock Toronto Bike Share bikes. So many ways to make unlocking bikes as easy as Uber, or even easier.

Some highschools/colleges/universities now provide free or discounted bikeshare memberships or discounts for such (defacto flat fee unlimited cycling pass) - and students love them because for less than the price of 1 metropass, gives you unlimited bike trips for a whole year. Those Students who are holding an unlimited instantly bike-unlocking card, WILL (on average) use them and get more exercise.

Waiting 6min for expensive Uber, 17min for next non-overflowing bus, or using that card in your wallet to immediately unlock any tempting bike on a nice sunny day at the school bikeshare station? The buses are kind of iffy here sometimes (google #FixTheHSR). You guess which the actual student here just unlocked.

One tap. Take any bike. Abandon bike at any different station (including school stations). Done. Repeat unlimited for free. Your ride to school is one brief rental. Your ride home from school is a separate brief rental. Bikeshare membership = behaves as unlimited cycling pass card that unlocks a bike faster than boarding a bus. And you can still take the bus in the other direction when it rains.

Sorry for being blunt, EastYorkTTCFan. As a driver, a transit user, I feel your "Empty Suburb Bike Lane Angst" but I hope you educate yourself more fully on How A Bike Share System Works. The annual pass card instantly unlocks all bikes as fast as Presto tap. The average highschooler over here rents a bikeshare for 8 to 15min to ride 1-way to school here. Rent/responsibility ends when the bike is parked anywhere, school dock, home dock, any dock.
 
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Northern Light said:
The evidence bares out that many apartment dwellers as well as many low income earners and/or novice cyclists are much more likely to take cycling up when a bikeshare system is in place and convenient to them.
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Just wanted to add an anecdote about this. In 2011 I hadn't been on a bike in over 10 years but tried Bixi the first week it launched in Toronto. It made me realize how much faster it was to get places by bike vs the TTC and I've had a membership for 8 years now. I also eventually got my own bike so that I could bike to places outside of their service zone. I went from using the TTC almost everyday to using the TTC a couple of times per month and bike pretty much everywhere now.
 
LNahid2000 said:
Just wanted to add an anecdote about this. In 2011 I hadn't been on a bike in over 10 years but tried Bixi the first week it launched in Toronto. It made me realize how much faster it was to get places by bike vs the TTC and I've had a membership for 8 years now. I also eventually got my own bike so that I could bike to places outside of their service zone. I went from using the TTC almost everyday to using the TTC a couple of times per month and bike pretty much everywhere now.
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Yup. I live in the middle of downtown and can probably average 5 trips a month on the TTC, mostly to areas that are too far to bike.
 
Yeah, it's pretty crazy. I used to live at Bathurst and Lakeshore and worked at U of T - the commute would take me anywhere between 30 minutes and 1 hour 15 minutes by TTC barring any exceptional service disruptions. I previously had to walk to a bikeshare near Bathurst and Wellington then the nearest dock to my office was College and Huron, then I had to walk a bit up Huron; the total commute including the walks was about 30 minutes consistently. If the current docks were in place when I lived there, the total commute would probably have been about 20 minutes. And more bike lanes/cycle tracks have gone in. More than anything, I hated the inconsistency on the TTC, 30 vs 75 minutes.
 
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