Bike Share

“Bike Share Toronto” bicycles can be rented in an area of downtown defined roughly as South of Bloor Street, between Bathurst and Parliament.

Oddly enough, this is basically the perimeter of my regular walking tracks.

I walk to north of St Clair Avenue on Wednesdays, but Bike Share doesn’t extend that far.

How It Works

At a Bike Share station you use your credit card; a $200 deposit is held, and for a $7 charge you can make use of bicycles all day long.

You take the bike from a stand, ride it wherever you will, and return it to the same, or any other bike stand.

The first 30 minutes of a ride is free; you pay $1.50 for the second half-hour, then the rates INCREASE for longer periods.

You can ride all day for free as long as you hop from stand to stand within 30 minutes, although what would you do when you can cross the area north-south or east-west in under 30 minutes?

I suppose sightseeing (on a bike in the downtown core?) or just a great many trivial errands. One could almost run a small-parcel courier service off Bike Share Toronto.

Here are the Bike Share stands in Toronto; my closest location is at Bay and College.

Here is part of the core in more detail. I have marked two libraries, a supermarket and a church as some of my twenty-minute walks on a regular basis.

That is, Bike Share would not save me much time for my dally chores.

$7 is three-and-a-half senior’s tickets, so if I were taking the TTC four times in one day over an area covered by Bike Share, then Bike Share would be economic.

I can, of course, pay my $7 outside my door, cycle to the perimeter of the served area and within the 30-minute limit swap my bike for another bike and ride away from the perimeter for fifteen minutes before returning to the perimeter and making a second swap for the final homeward leg. I wouldn’t have accomplished much it is true.

I could see me running errands:-

Leg (1) College/Bay to Bloor and Bathurst; inspect books in the Spanish language bookshop.

Leg (2) Bloor/Bathurst to Bloor/Bay; drop off and collect books from the Yorkville branch of Toronto Public Library.

Leg (3) Bloor/Bay to Parliament/Gerrard; collect groceries from No Frills supermarket.

Leg (4) Parliament/Gerrard to College/Bay; go home.

I could

introduce

Leg (5) To Trinity-Bellwoods park and eat my lunch in the park before cycling somewhere else.

Leg (6) To the Islands Airport and watch planes take off before cycling somewhere else.

Leg (7) To Queens Quay and Jarvis; explore the docks before cycling somewhere else.

Leg (8) To Queen Street West near Bathurst to get my kitchen knives sharpened.

Of course, for someone in my position it makes the most sense to pack a lunch and just spend the day (and seven dollars) cycling from one station to the next, just hop on and hop off bikes, to see how easy it is.

Or isn’t.

If you arrive at a Bike Share stand and no room is available, you can get a 15-minute extension which is supposed to give you enough time to find another stand nearby. But then, of course, you aren’t as near to your final destination as you had hoped to be.

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