Who should pay the piper?

Mayor Rob Ford and TTC chair Karen Stintz were at it again this week, squaring off over the bike-share system Bixi. Bixi, a portmanteau of bicycle and taxi, is a bike-share system that originated in Montreal in 2008. The system has now spread to several American cities, as well as Melbourne, Australia, and London.

Much like a car share, it works by making available bicycles via a pay station, and charges users a regular subscription fee. In the case of Bixi, short-term grab-and-go rides of less than 30 minutes acquire no additional charge. Longer-term fees are more than reasonable, at about $1.50/hr; an annual subscription is $97.

The bikes use handlebars that conceal wires to help protect them from vandalism (and Canadian winters), puncture-resistant heavy-duty tires, and integrated lights, but people are still susceptible to bad behaviour: within a couple of months of the Montreal introduction, 20% of the bikes had been damaged and 15 of the bike racks defective. Reported damage has since tapered off.

In Toronto, Bixi is not faring well financially, having managed to pay less than 10% of its $4.5 million start-up loan, now in danger of defaulting. Stintz, an avid cyclist, has proposed that the TTC assume control, even use public funds to locate bike stations outside TTC stations.

Not being much of a cyclist myself, I was leaning towards the “who cares?” camp on the border of the “hey, that’s my money!” camp when Stintz made a good, albeit should have been obvious, point: “Every form of transportation in the world is subsidized. Whether it’s air, rail, road, shipping, public transit, Bixi,” she said. “Before we decide to kill it, I’d like to explore if we can expand it and make it more effective. It could potentially be a new model.”

She’s right — we subsidize the TTC and GO Transit. Why aren’t we subsidizing something inherently green and inherently healthy like a bike share program? I’m not saying to let it go on indefinitely or let it become a money pit, but without sufficient time and trial, how do we know what’s possible? Bixi offers its subscribers free bicycling courses. With enough education and encouragement, are there city dwellers who could be retrained to take a bicycle instead of a cab? Might those of us who avoid the TTC because numerous transfers make our trips too onerous change our ways if we could leg it by bicycle the last few blocks? Even those suburban commuters who take their cars into the city, not because they object to the train, but because they object to the time-sucking sequence of subway, streetcar, streetcar, two-block walk to get to work, might consider a GO Train commute if they could emerge into the sunshine and ride the last portion in 10 minutes or so.

We already know what doesn’t work, and just by looking at him it’s clear we can’t count on Rob Ford to do anything innovative that involves pedalling. “We’re losing money. Why would we want to change hands? It’s not working. It should just be dissolved,” he said. How about because the way we’ve done things so far has resulted in a fat population, too much pollution, and gridlock. You know that old saw about the definition of insanity? How it’s doing the same thing over and over the same way and expecting a different result? Well, call me crazy, but I say let’s expect a different result, and stick with Bixi just a little bit longer, and let’s put some PR muscle behind it.

In the meantime, at least we get to watch these arch-enemies go at each other. On Monday, the mayor said he was going to hold councillors “accountable” in the next election should they dare to add the debate to their Tuesday agenda (yesterday’s meeting is too late for our publication schedule), including Stintz, who countered that Ford might want to count himself among them if he wants to build a subway in Scarborough. On second thought, maybe I’ll just make some popcorn and watch the show.

For her part, city planner Jennifer Keesmaat said she hoped it would make the agenda, and that it “behooves the city of Toronto to add its voice to that conversation, and I would argue to be a leader in that conversation.” Toronto was once a transit leader, and Keesmaat said this week that we were just cashing in on that legacy without contributing to it, that ignoring the issue is essentially just pushing it onto the next generation. She said that the future will depend on attracting the echo-boomers, the highly desirable 18-34s, who want to walk, ride their bikes, and enjoy sustainable and heart-friendly infrastructure.

“That generation is already voting … through our condo boom,” she said. “They’re showing us where they want to live.” I think it’s safe to say that the voice of the next generation is not going to be Ford’s.