Le français viendra sous peu.
Ecology Ottawa attended City Council’s Public Works and Infrastructure committee on April 23 to urge the adoption of a bike share system.
As a report from City staff outlines, this concept has undergone several studies already—most recently, a feasibility study. This latest study observed that bike share could be rolled out in early 2027; but instead of adopting the study’s recommendation, the Committee opted to produce—drum roll, please—another study.
This is frustrating. There are numerous potential benefits to bike share, and our transportation is strained. If you’d like to support the cause, please sign our petition with Bike Ottawa, and visit our campaign page for more information.
Please also read our delegation below, or watch it here.
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In one sense, this report is welcome: it shows us how eminently feasible bike share is, and the many of its attendant benefits. But in a broader context, it has us wondering: why another report? As the staff report outlines, we’ve received reports on bike share in 2021, 2024, 2025, and now the present feasibility study. We’ve also seen bike share deployed with great success in peer cities, like Toronto, Montreal, Québec City, and Hamilton, among many others. So what’s the hold-up? When will we actually take the step we know we should take?
The consequences of the City’s delay on adopting bike share are real. We would have benefited greatly from bike share in January when 1 in 10 bus trips were cancelled, or when New Ways To Bus rolled out last May, and people needed to adapt to new routes and fewer overall hours, or even when the LRT first opened, and bus routes downtown were removed—the very location where bike share would be first deployed. The point is that bike share offers resilience, and our transportation system has recently been showing how un-resilient it is.
Looking at staff’s recommendation on this report—their intention to “carry out additional review of cost considerations and system types (public versus private) and develop a funding and rollout strategy” suggests that they’re considering bike share the wrong way. The feasibility study cites the cost as minimal—around $20 million over 5 years, including up-front capital costs and operations.
For some perspective, let’s compare these to a few other recent transportation-related expenses:
- Earl Grey Underpass: $28 million
- Airport Parkway widening: $89 million
- Greenbank widening: $56 million in this year’s budget alone
And the list goes on. Each of these offers at best a localized reduction of travel times for cars. Moreover, we know from the phenomenon of induced demand that this reduction will be temporary, and that we’re only adding more cars to an already strained system.
In this light, the City should be leaping at the opportunity to implement a bike share system. What other $20 million investment over 5 years would provide affordable and accessible mobility over a 30 km2 area, while also easing car traffic? In fact, it gets better: A 2025 study by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology estimated a 10 percent return on investment from bike share, when you account for the environmental, health, and economic benefits. The City should go all in on bike share, minimizing the cost to those riding bikes, since everyone benefits. And the 260 people who signed our petition with Bike Ottawa agree.
Speaking of environmental benefits, I would be remiss to not mention some directly ecological aspects. Last September, we learned that emissions from transportation have increased from 41 percent to 44 percent of all community emissions. A few months earlier, while discussing Phase 4 of the Transportation Master Plan, City staff shared revised modal share projections, whereby we're abandoning the Official Plan’s commitment to shift to sustainable transportation. Should we be surprised, given the slow pace of cycling infrastructure rollout and our massive investments in car infrastructure?
Of course, bike share can help. Operational emissions from bike share are almost nil, and roughly 30 percent of trips in Ottawa are 2 kilometres or less—well within biking range. Again, this is low-hanging fruit.
We also learned last September that our urban tree canopy is slowly decreasing. Our approach to transportation projects isn’t helping: we’re paving everything over. In terms of moving humans—the goal of a transportation system, after all—bikes require much less space, leaving more space for trees and biodiversity.
The feasibility study observes that a viable system “can be procured [and] launched in Spring 2027,” and that it “provides the necessary information to progress the project.” So then what are we waiting for?
