Should Ottawa – Gatineau try a bike share again?

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As Light Rail starts to extend into new areas and talk of a Bus Rapid Corridor on Baseline is somewhat intensifying, it is probably time to revisit the idea of a bike share system for Ottawa.

Vancouver has one, Toronto has one, Montreal has one, Quebec City has one. Hamilton and Kitchener-Waterloo have one. And hundreds of cities around the world have them: bike share systems that allow people to hop on a bike, cover a few kilometers and leave it at another place. You may have seen them in a place like Paris, where the Vélib bike share system employs no less than 20,000 bikes, of which 40% is electric nowadays, spread over 1400 stations. It is kind of like a self powered taxi really.

Bikeshare in Quebec city

The àVélo system in Quebec is more modest. It is operated by the Reseau de Transport de la Capitale and has 1800 bikes divided over 165 stations ready for 2025, up from 1300 bikes and 100 stations in 2024. Quebec puts the bike in storage for the winter, but it is so popular that every year the number of bikes and stations needs to be increased. In 2023, the system clocked 650,000 trips.

What many people already know for a long time, is that covering short distances by bike is just as fast, if not faster, on a bike than by car when you include searching for parking (read, driving around the block) and missing the green traffic light.

Tried before

Ottawa, as many of us recall, used to have a Bixi bike system, introduced in 2011 until 2015, but there were only a handful of bikes and bike stations, 250 bikes and 25 stations to be precise. It was run by the NCC because the City wanted to focus on building better and more cycling infrastructure first. Therefore the NCC had to mostly park stations on their own land, which is along the rivers and the canal, not exactly places where you pick up a bike to go to the Byward market. Looking into the data, you could see the average Bixi bike was used as a rental bike to bike around town for an hour, not as a quick 10 minute hop on hop off run.

Another out of town bike rental tried for two years, called VeloGo, but it somewhat strangely fizzled out. For several years, Shane ran a modest bike share in Hintonburg for Causeway Work Centre, called RightBike.

Cycling is growing in Ottawa

But the dream of a bike share is not dead. Far from it. Cycling is growing in Ottawa. The bike modal share grew from 1.4% in 1995 to 3.9% in 2022 in the Ottawa Origin – Destination Surveys. That was not a linear growth. Until 2011, growth was very modest, but once the City and the NCC started to build more cycling infrastructure, the numbers started to grow much faster. From 1995 to 2011 (16 years) there was a modest growth of only 0.4%. Between 2011 to 2022 (11 years), after the Laurier bike lane opened and subsequent new infrastructure was built, there was a growth of 2% to the 3.9% (5 times as much).

Bike share report

Last year, Envirocentre with support of the Ottawa Climate Action Fund, commissioned a report that looked into the viability of a bike share in Ottawa and how to run it.

Across a wide variety of studies and pilot projects, the key ingredients of a successful bike share start-up include the number and placement of bikes, connections to transit, proximity to neighbourhoods and services, having enough bikes available to meet demand, and the durability of the bikes themselves. – Envirocentre report

Transit connections

You may have seen those monster bike parking buildings in the Netherlands, either in real life or on photos. They are there because cycling and transit are tightly integrated. People bike a few kilometers to a train station, park their own bike and hop on the train. At the other end, they may take a bike share system bike. They may take a bike to go to a meeting a few kilometers away. Or they may take one after transit stops running at night.

Transit revenues rise: in 2022, according to the North American Bikeshare and Scootershare Association (NABSA), 64% of riders reported that they used shared micromobility to connect to transit, and a 2015 study in Washington, DC calculated that a 10% increase in bike share trips would directly contribute to a 2.8% increase in transit ridership. – Envirocentre report

Designing a bike share system

Designing the system can be tricky. It has to fill gaps in transit, but you can’t roll it out across the city all at once either. It has to be flexible enough to adjust quickly if demand is different than expected. You can’t charge too much and it should be super easy to pay for. I personally believe a system that uses docking stations is better. You know where to find the bikes and the operators don’t have to pick up bikes all over the place (like the e-scooters in the first years).

It is not cheap either and therefore operators have to figure out a fee that makes people want to use it, while recognizing the system has to partly pay for itself. I write partly, because we have to see it as a utility, not as a profit maker, just like roads, transit, dog parks, libraries, theaters, community buildings and sportsplexes. The basic idea is to give people transport choices, to relieve our clogged roads at rush hour from congestion and cut back on people cruising around searching for parking.

Connect bike share with transit

When Line 1 is finished, I can see a much better opportunity to establish a bike share. Dutch railways in 2002 started out with 800 bikes, and now operates 22,000 bikes. Yes, you read that right. Dutch railways operates a bike share system, because they recognised it brings in customers; they also invest heavily in excellent parking facilities. The reason why you see those massive bike parkings in the Netherlands is that the municipalities got fed up with the thousands of bikes all over the place. All those pink, yellow, tiger striped, dotted single speed bikes make for great photos, but the local governments weren’t happy. Hold your breath: in Amsterdam, the railways even went as far as building a bike parking under water (short video) for 7000 bicycles.

According to the City (and the report), once the second stage of Ottawa’s LRT system is complete, 77% of the city’s population will live within five kilometers from light rail— which is only 15-20 minutes on a bike. I don’t think we should focus on light rail only though, bus lanes play an important role too. Then you can finally get rid of that Honda CRV, if it isn’t stolen yet, and spend your savings on a trip to Paris to ride one of the 20,000 Vélibs.

Important: Safe Cycling Infrastructure

One more very important thing: safe cycling infrastructure is going to be vital for the success of a bike share, as our city recognised before. You can build all the bike share systems and stations you want, but if people don’t feel safe in traffic on their bikes, they won’t use it. Investing in road safety is paramount, which benefits everyone anyway. But we should be able to make it work: if Quebec City can make it work, we should be able to as well. In other good news: I have already seen several kids cycling by our house and it is still March.

Look online for the Envirocentre report. It has a lot of cost considerations and data. 

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