City gears up for bike rental plan

Toronto is getting the wheels in motion to roll out a high-tech rent-a-bike program next year, not unlike a wildly successful one in Paris, says the head of the city’s cycling committee.“It will be announced sometime in the late fall and launched in the summer of 2009,” Councillor Adrian Heaps said.

Heaps said Toronto plans to emulate the best aspects of programs in other jurisdictions and would include automated stations, with swipe-card access, with a subscription that would give access to a uniform style of bicycle “that is tried and proven around the world.”

“It can be a one-speed or three-speed bicycle with a kind of mousetrap rack on the back where you can put books or a briefcase,” he added.

High-tech service, to begin next year, modelled on successful global initiatives such as Velib in Paris

But other details are up in the air, he said.

“We need to determine where the best locations (for hubs) are. How many bicycles could work? Do we do it in the downtown core? Do we do it (where there are) subways and intermodal transportation hubs?” Heaps asked.

Such programs are gaining in popularity around the world with the rise of gas prices and environmental consciousness. Launched just a year ago, Paris’s Velib program already has more than 211,000 subscribers who have taken 31 million trips. Denver, Minneapolis and Washington, D.C., are kicking off similar programs this summer. Montreal is starting a trial program next month with full service due to be offered next spring.

Portland, Seattle, Chicago and San Francisco are looking at launching similar programs, while Copenhagen, Lyon and Barcelona already have such bike-sharing programs in place.

The Paris program has about 20,000 bikes and 1,400 self-serve rental kiosks. It’s known as Velib, a hybrid of the French words v