The Good, the Bad, and the E-Bike

It’s good value for money - I spend $120 a year on my membership and that lets me take bikes out for 45 minutes at a time. It’s (mostly) easy to find a bike within a short walk, (mostly) easy to find a docking station at my destination, and I don’t even have to own a bike. But, mainly: even in the dead of winter, it’s still a vastly superior experience than my local streetcar - which is just completely terrible now.

If I can bike somewhere, I’ll bike. If I can’t bike or I’m with people who don’t want to bike, I’ll take transit. Most of my friends aren’t too scared of biking in the city, which means I’ve managed to spend about $400 less on transit this year versus 2022.

More importantly, the bike share program is great value for the city, especially when considered in the context of Toronto’s current financial Armageddon.

Bike Share Toronto operates at a loss of a few million per year ($2.6 million in 2023²), or $0.67 per ride³. The TTC has a subsidy per trip of $4.08⁴, for comparison.

The system is great, and it’s overlooked by way too many people.

But I’ve got an axe to grind.

The e-bike fleet expanded massively over the last year, going from 525 e-bikes at the end of 2022⁵ to over 1800 at present⁶.

There are two e-bike models in use: the E-Fit, and the “E-Fit G5” - a modernized version of the E-Fit with a fancy digital speedometer and slightly strangely-angled brake levers.

The challenge with e-bikes are, of course, that e-bikes need to be charged (ours have a range of 70km).

Fortunately, the bike manufacturer (PBSC) has a nifty patent⁷ on charging e-bikes through the station docking connector. Un-fortunately, out of our ~750 stations, precisely 20 are charging stations (see list)

Unless someone happens to dock an e-bike at one of those stations, those e-bikes eventually run out of charge and then some poor sap has to drive around at 1 AM and load a bunch of e-bikes into a van so that they can be charged somewhere.

I’m assuming there’s a warehouse somewhere with hundreds of chargers where the e-bikes get taken to sleep. I don’t actually know this for sure (and nor have I have seen reference to such a place existing) - but who would buy close to 2000 e-bikes without having a way to charge them?

Time for a quick detour.

Around the start of June the station outside my partner’s place was upgraded to a charging station. Cool - surely that means there’s gonna be a higher chance I’ll be able to snag an e-bike! Especially since at the same time they expanded the station capacity (number of docks) by about 50%.

My partner’s place is uphill (way uphill) from my place so there’s really no reason for me to take an e-bike on the way home - though I will go to great lengths to track down an e-bike on the way to their place. So I was honestly more stoked about the extra docks, because it’s pretty annoying arriving at your destination, finding all the docks full, and then having to trek 20 minutes out of your way to go find an open dock.

It took a few weeks for them to upgrade the station (I had to trek a whole 3 minutes longer to the next closest station!).

And once the station reopened, it was full. Always full. Every single time I’d go to drop off a bike at the damn station, it was full.

But if it’s full, at least you’ll have no problem taking bikes out from it, right?

Haha, wrong. It quickly became apparent that the station was completely full of dead e-bikes. At first I assumed that I was just getting unlucky.

But the station would stay full of dead e-bikes for weeks on end.

Not only that, but it seemed to me like they were the same bikes.

I wanted to prove it - both to myself, and eventually to my city councilor so that it can get fixed.

I’m a software engineer, so I figured the only way to prove it would be to find a way to get access to the data feed that the bike share app uses. Luckily for me, the city of Toronto is pretty committed to open data; the data feed is public.

I’ve been building a tool that logs and stores the minute-to-minute station data that the city publishes so that I can visualize and analyze it to figure out just what the hell is going on (see: bikes.cfeeley.org).

It was immediately obvious that the number of disabled bikes at the station wasn’t fluctuating.

It’s important to note that I can’t differentiate between a broken bike (customers can press a button on the dock to flag the bike for servicing, which locks the bike to the station) or a dead e-bike (which happens automatically when the charge falls below some threshold) from the data feed. They both show up as a disabled bike in the feed. However, since the number of disabled bikes wasn’t fluctuation, and since I could just walk outside to check what kind of bikes are in the station, I knew for sure they were e-bikes.

That’s meant that I’ve been poring over city hall documents to try to make sense of the mechanics of how the system operates. How does charging work? How many charging stations and docks do we have? How does re-balancing (moving bikes from a full station to emptier stations) work?

Eventually, I stumbled across a report from Bike Share Toronto to the board of directors of the Toronto Parking Authority.

Buried on page 6 of that document⁸ is what seems to be a damning admission that might explain what’s happening (emphasis mine):

E-bikes and charging stations are fully compatible with the rest of the system, allowing both conventional bikes and e-bikes to be docked in any solar-powered and e-bike charging station. Their complexities, however, offer some operational challenges that don’t exist in the regular system, that Bike Share staff are working to address. A list of these items can be found in Appendix A.

Currently, e-bike maintenance is included in TPA’s Operator Agreement with SHIFT Transit Inc., whereas e-bike operations are not included. TPA is in discussions with SHIFT Transit Inc. surrounding e-bike operations to ensure that Bike Share can provide its customers with the same high-level experience expected of our regular iconic bike operations (i.e., convenient, and easy to find bikes). TPA anticipates that a report will be presented to the TPA Board of Directors in third quarter (Q3) – fourth quarter (Q4) 2022 with contract amendments specific to e-bike operations.

Are you kidding me?

But who would buy close to 2000 e-bikes without having a way to charge them?

Apparently: Toronto.

Now, I’ve read every document I can find from the Toronto Parking Authority’s board meetings. I can find no other mention of this contract amendment. It’s possible it never went to the board… but it’s possible it just doesn’t exist.

So I’ve started filing freedom of information (FOI) requests.

Read about them here:

• Part 2: The Request: for the text of the first FOI request I sent
• Part 3: The Response: for the text of the response to the first FOI request
• Part 4: Discrepancies: for an analysis of some very strange numbers in their data feed
• Part 5: Much ado about a contract (the second request): for the second FOI request I sent (requesting the contract between the Toronto Parking Authority and Shift Transit)