Opinion: TransLink should launch Metro Vancouver's regional bike share

Bike share services of Lime in North Vancouver (left) and Mobi in Vancouver (right). (City of North Vancouver | Mobi Bike Share)

Written for Daily Hive Urbanized by Sean Sallis-Lyon, who is a resident of North Vancouver.

Imagine if Metro Vancouver had a bike share service that integrated with our monthly public transit passes and covered the entire region.

You could get on bike share, travel to a SkyTrain station, and transfer to your train, all via a one-zone fare on your Compass Card. Imagine an integrated system, where you wouldn’t have to worry about last-mile transfers, where your monthly pass would have everything included for one low price.

We should build such a system. It wouldn’t cost much, and it would dramatically improve transportation throughout Metro Vancouver.

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Most North Americans don’t have a good frame of reference for what a good bike share service looks like. For those who’ve travelled to Montreal, you’ve probably seen the Bixi bikes; it’s a non-profit run by the City of Montreal and it’s one of the best bike share services in the world. This is a dependable service that helps people get around and keeps people active.

We need a similar service for Metro Vancouver.

We have two main bike share services available throughout our region: Mobi and Lime. Both have their issues and neither provides good coverage.

Mobi is currently limited to the City of Vancouver. Its bikes are flimsy, especially the shifters. Signing out a Mobi bike is a laborious process, especially the first time. You have to sign up on the app, enter your credit card, enter your six-digit user code on the bike, and then your four-digit passcode. The screens are often illegible, and the buttons are difficult to press. This alone is enough to turn away new users. There’s an option to link a card to the service, but it’s unintuitive, and you still have to enter a four-digit code every time.

On the other hand, Mobi has great coverage via its bike stations. These can be found across a large area of the City of Vancouver, and they make commuting extremely dependable; it’s rare to find an empty station. Pricing is also decent, with unlimited rides available for just $139 per year, though Mobi’s e-bikes cost extra. In the near future, Mobi will expand to the University of British Columbia campus, marking its first expansion outside the municipal borders of Vancouver.

Mobi Bike Bhare station map, as of July 2023. (Mobi Bike Share)

Lime bikes can be found on the North Shore and in Richmond, and soon in Coquitlam. They are built better and the app is better too. Signing out a Lime bike is easy; the app links with phone payment systems like Apple Pay, meaning you don’t need to manually enter your credit card. After signing up, you just scan a QR code and you’re off.

However, Lime is ridiculously expensive, to the point where nobody could possibly use them for everyday commuting. The company also doesn’t offer any monthly or yearly unlimited passes.

In North Vancouver it costs $1.15 to start your trip on Lime, then it’s $0.35 per minute, plus tax. Let’s say you want to do a quick 17 km trip along the Spirit Trail from the Lions Gate Bridge to the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge, about a 25-minute trip. This would cost almost $10, and for two people, this doubles to $20! Uber would be faster and cheaper.

Lime also doesn’t have a proper system for ending trips, at least not on the North Shore. There are some “groves” where you can find and return bikes, but generally, users are expected to dump their bikes on the sidewalks and the grass at the end of their trips. This means you can never guarantee that you’ll be able to find a bike when you need one. They aren’t dependable for commuting and the outrageous prices mean you’d never want to use them regularly.

Lime Bike Share (City of North Vancouver)

To make matters worse, Lime and Mobi don’t directly compete with one another, and you can’t take either of them between municipalities. This means you can’t take them over the bridges from the North Shore, where we desperately need to get cars off the road.

In contrast, Montreal’s Bixi bikes have stations all over the Island of Montreal and its neighbouring municipalities. They’re easy to use, well-built, and they even operate in the winter with studded tires. Even better, Bixi is integrated with the OPUS card, meaning you can use one card for the bus, the Metro, and the Bixi bikes.

Back in 2019, TransLink trialed a new type of Compass Card that bundled transit services with Evo and Modo car share, as well as Mobi bike share. However, there wasn’t any plan to offer discounted passes; instead, the card was meant to work as a way to pay for these other services, meaning you’d still have to pay full price for a bike share pass. It has yet to be made available outside of this limited trial.

Instead of turning the Compass Card into an alternative payment method for existing private bike share services, TransLink should operate its own regional bike share service. We should integrate bike sharing into the TransLink network, so it’s just another public transit mode you can use, like buses and SkyTrain. TransLink’s bike share service could cover the entire Metro Vancouver region, strategically placed to provide last-mile connectivity. Like Bixi, it could also operate 24/7.

This would be incredibly convenient. If your bus is running late, you’d have the option to use a bike instead, for the same cost, with the same transfers. If your bus is stuck in traffic, you could just get out, and grab a bike.

This kind of integration would not only help boost TransLink’s ridership, it would also get more people out biking. Cycling exploded in popularity during the pandemic, but many people just don’t have room in their homes for bikes. A public bike share service, stretching across our entire region, would be a perfect fit for TransLink and would align with its active transportation goals.

Bike parkade at SkyTrain’s Bridgeport Station. (TransLink)

translink bike lockers skytrain moody centre station

Bike lockers outside SkyTrain and West Coast Express’ Moody Centre Station. (TransLink)

Many people would sign up for the monthly pass just to use the bike share, then start using public transit more often as a result, and vice versa. It would also just be easier to get around.

Other bike share programs around the world already operate like this. In the Netherlands, OV-Fiets bike share membership is included on the NS discount card, with 22,000 bikes and 500,000 regular users throughout the country. Hangzhou, Taiyuan, Shanghai, Paris, London, New York, and Barcelona have similar programs.

We shouldn’t rely solely on the private sector and we shouldn’t have bike share programs that are different in every municipality. We need an integrated, region-wide system that everybody can use, one that is supported by provincial and municipal governments alike. We need bikes to seamlessly integrate into our public transit services, so they’re even more appealing and easy to use.

TransLink could work with Mobi and the City of Vancouver to improve and expand the service, or possibly start its own. It could also work with Bixi to emulate or import the service here, as other cities have done. Bus stops could have bike stations and we could have stations spread throughout neighbourhoods, shopping centres, parks, and other points of interest. The Compass Card would be the main way to use the service, but credit and debit cards could also be accepted. Private operators like Lime could continue to operate alongside, serving tourists.

E-bike on Vancouver’s Mobi public bike share. (David Niddrie/Mobi)

Building a regional bike share service would be an incredibly cheap way for TransLink to offer drastically more service throughout the region. Montreal’s Bixi bikes cost approximately $3.6 million annually to operate ($1,500 per bike; a fleet of 2,400 bikes; 300 parking stations; data from 2019); even if we doubled or quadrupled that, it would still be a bargain compared to the cost of similar bus coverage.

We need to get more people on public transit, and more people biking. We need more options for getting around that don’t pollute our region and more options that don’t contribute to climate change. The people of Metro Vancouver need a proper, regional bike share service.

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