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This week:
- This kind of public transportation is growing really fast
- Reader feedback: How Tim Hortons should fill your cup
- Canada’s biggest passive house
- A parking lot back to a pond — that’s how McMaster University plans to ‘re-wild’ its west campus
Bike sharing sees huge growth across Canada
Fewer Canadians have been using public buses and trains since the pandemic. But one new type of public transportation is seeing huge growth in cities across Canada — bike sharing.
Riders say it’s a convenient way to take one-way trips during busy days around Canada’s cities without the hassle of maintaining, storing and securing your own bike.
Cities say it’s part of an effort to provide an affordable transportation option that can help fill gaps in the public transportation system.
Montreal’s Bixi, the first public bike sharing system in North America, said 576,000 users or roughly 1 in 4 Montrealers took 11.7 million trips in 2023 – up 31 per cent since 2022 and 55 per cent since 2021.
Justin Hanna, director of Bike Share Toronto, said Canada’s biggest city has also been seeing double-digit growth in usage, and expects 6.2 million rides in 2024 on its fleet of 9,000 bikes, up from 5.7 million the year before and just 665,000 in 2015.
In contrast, transit ridership in Canada hasn’t fully recovered from the huge drop during the COVID-19 pandemic, and was still below 2020 levels in January 2024.
The downside of bike sharing’s growth? “The demand for our program far exceeds the supply of bikes that we currently have,” Hanna said. In response to the popularity, Bike Share Toronto will add 200 stations with additional bikes in the next two years.
Similarly, in Montreal, one Bixi user told CBC’s Brittany Henriques that she sometimes had trouble finding bikes or places to “dock” and return them.
Still, riders say that for those who are able, there are many reasons to use bike sharing.
“I like going for a bike ride better than sitting in a crowded streetcar,” said Jake Roslyn, who said he is a “huge fan” of Bike Share Toronto and used it regularly when he lived downtown.
Hanna said it’s the most affordable way to travel the city (besides walking), and often faster than driving, especially now that e-bikes have been added to the fleet. Annual memberships start at $105, and there are also day pass, pay-as-you-go options, and discounts for low-income users.
Allison Boulton of Vancouver didn’t think she’d use her city’s Mobi bike sharing service, since she owned her own bike. “Oh my – was I wrong!” she wrote to CBC’s What on Earth? newsletter.
“A shared bike is perfect for a journey when you’ll have multiple stops and don’t want to keep locking and unlocking your bike.”
She also uses it for one-way trips where she might walk or taxi home, or riding with visiting friends. Since joining in 2017, she says she’s logged 1,665 kilometres on Mobi.
Bike sharing has now spread to many smaller cities such as Calgary, which offers e-bikes and e-scooters through two private companies, Bird Canada and Neuron. It saw a 25 per cent increase in ridership of those options between 2021 to 2023.
Andrew Sedor, the city’s Mobility Initiatives lead, said bikes and scooters provide more transportation options and can help people get from a transit station to their final destination.
Last summer, the city piloted a free transfer between transit and e-bikes or e-scooters at one transit station. Even though it wasn’t advertised, it generated 1,100 trips on the bikes and scooters in August alone, and 75 per cent of users surveyed said it made transit more attractive. Now Calgary is trying to figure out how to integrate a similar free transfer into its entire transit system.
Being able to connect to transit is something bike share users like Jake Roslyn see as a key benefit.
He has moved to Scarborough, on the outskirts of Toronto, and would like to bike to the local Scarborough GO station to get to work. But it doesn’t yet have a Bike Share station, and he can’t easily get bike parking at his condo building.
“I miss Bike Share dearly, but it needs more transit connectivity,” he wrote. “Once it has that, I believe that Bike Share and transit will be the best way to get around.”
Some good news: Hanna says a new station, including both conventional and e-bikes, will be added at the Scarborough GO station later this year.
– Emily Chung
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Reader feedback: How Tim Hortons should fill your cup
Jim Bodie of Sherwood Park, Alta., wrote in about his experience bringing a reusable cup to Tim Hortons “to eliminate one plastic cup from their waste each week. Imagine my disappointment as I watched the server prepare my drink in a Tim Hortons [disposable] drink cup, and then pour it into my cup when it was done. Something ventured, but nothing gained.”
We here at What On Earth? have also experienced this in Ontario and were also disappointed. So we wrote to Tim Hortons, and they called us back. They said that, in fact, every Tim Hortons franchise is given an equipment kit that includes reusable cups for measuring drinks into customers’ reusable cups. Disposable cups should not be used for that purpose. They added that any customer who has had an experience like Bodie’s should contact Tim Hortons customer service and share the location where it happened. That way, the employees can be reminded of the waste-free way to serve drinks into reusable cups.
Write us at whatonearth@cbc.ca.
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The Big Picture: Canada’s biggest passive house
Harmony Commons is a new nine-storey, 746-bed student residence at University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC). Its first residents moved in this past fall. But it achieved another milestone just a couple of months ago — it was certified as Canada’s largest passive house building, at 265,000 square feet. Passive house is a stringent international standard for energy efficiency that relies on airtight construction, efficient insulation and a heat-recovery ventilation system. In a news release, Andrew Arifuzzaman, chief administrative officer for UTSC, said the building has “proven that passive house is an attainable standard for future large-scale developments.”
– Emily Chung
Hot and bothered: Provocative ideas from around the web
A parking lot back to a pond — that’s how McMaster University plans to ‘re-wild’ its west campus
Decades ago, McMaster University paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
Now the Hamilton post-secondary school is looking to reverse course and “re-wild” its west campus that sits beside the Cootes Paradise nature sanctuary.
Rewilding is a way to re-naturalize environments in degraded locations — an approach that has gained popularity in Europe in recent years, and remains less explored in North America, according to Canada’s science agency.
It usually involves removing human-built impediments like dams, or in this case pavement, and then allow nature to take back the space. It’s an approach being used in the Scottish Highlands and Detroit, and on Vancouver Island.
McMaster’s strategy is part of its new master plan developed by international design firm BDP. The project is the firm’s first for a post-secondary campus in North America, after working on several in Europe.
The area, west of Cootes Drive, is primed for naturalization, said Yves Bonnardeaux, senior architect with BDP Quadrangle in Toronto.
It’s used predominately for surface parking, with over 1,300 spots, but is also located in a flood plain and surrounded by old growth trees, creeks and trails, he said. Around 800 of those spots are expected to be reclaimed by nature, McMaster said.
“The university sits right beside the kind of eco-park system that links Dundas all the way to the lake, which is super important,” said Bonnardeaux.
The area is expected to become an extension of Cootes Paradise, with a pond likely to form after the parking lot is removed.
The naturalization process at McMaster will be gradual, with BDP recommending the university first find ways to reduce demand for parking to free up the land.
That could include building an above-ground parking structure to replace some spots and creating more on-campus housing so students don’t have to commute in, Bonnardeaux said.
The planned light rail transit (LRT) line that will link McMaster to the rest of the city will also be crucial, Bonnardeaux said.
Saher Fazilat, McMaster’s vice president of operations, told CBC Hamilton the university has committed to not developing the west campus any further.
As the rewilding process takes shape, students and faculty may also use the west campus as a “living and learning lab,” Fazilat said.
McMaster doesn’t have a set timeline for the rewilding project, but it’ll be part of achieving its goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, said Fazilat.
The new master plan replaces one originally from 2002.
“This time around we wanted to go big and bold with sustainability,” said Fazilat.
The 10-year strategy recommends McMaster no longer allow vehicles in the “heart of campus,” create more public gathering spaces, as well as embrace its “outstanding natural surroundings.”
– Samantha Beattie
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Editors: Emily Chung and Hannah Hoag | Logo design: Sködt McNalty