Exploring Bike Share Growth in Toronto

Toronto's Bike Share system has grown substantially over the past decade, providing a healthy and sustainable mode of travel to thousands of Torontonians and visitors. Ridership has increased from about 665,000 trips in 2015 to 5.7 million in 2023 (if you build it they will ride!). In the chart below, one = 25,000 Bike Share trips. Almost every year, ridership records for daily, weekly, monthly, and annual trips have been broken.

That's a lot of trips!

Below we chart this growth month-by-month to track seasonal patterns of expansion and uptake. We'll hopefully update this page as more data is released into 2025 and beyond!

The data presented on this page are sourced from the City of Toronto's Open Data Portal. The data from 2017 onward denote the duration of each trip. We noticed that there were a number of 'trips' where the duration was quite low and which started and ended at the same location. We think that these trips are mostly people unlocking bikes and then locking them back up because something on the bike is broken or that it doesn't match their preferences (e.g. the seat height is stuck). As such, we have filtered out all trips that were less than 2 minutes and which started and ended at the same station, as we felt these weren't 'true' trips. Therefore, the numbers presented here may be slightly different than reported elsewhere.

Bike Share Ridership by Month

(we are missing monthly data from 0ct 2015 to June 2016)

August consistently records the highest ridership between 2019 and 2024. In August 2024, monthly ridership reached more than 900,000 trips, over 400,000 more than the same period in 2021. Colder months (November to March) have also recently experienced much higher ridership compared to the same months in previous years.

A notable difference in trip patterns occurred during the early months of the pandemic. While the number of trips usually increased after February, this was not the case in 2020. After a small growth in March, the province went into a lockdown on March 24, 2020, resulting in a drop in ridership in April and lower ridership in May compared to previous years. However, ridership quickly bounced back starting in June, and by July 2020, it exceeded the ridership of August 2019, the highest month in 2019. January and February of 2022 also have low ridership likely due to a similar lockdown. Since then, winter cycling has more than tripled.

The Bike Share system has expanded from 79 stations in 2014 to 855 by September, 2024 (based on the number of unique station IDs in the ridership data). The chart below illustrates this expansion. Before 2020, large expansions would occur in July, with many stations installed in either June or July. The pace of expansion slowed in 2021, resulting in a relatively stable number of stations. In 2022, the expansion occurred incrementally, with a few stations installed each month.

Number of Operating Bike Share Stations

(we are missing monthly data from 0ct 2015 to June 2016)

We can also calculate average station usage by dividing ridership by the number of stations. As shown in the chart below, average station usage also fluctuates seasonally, similar to overall ridership totals. The lowest usage is typically observed in January or February, with fewer than 200 rides started from each station during these months, and much higher usage in the summer months.

Trips Per Station

(we are missing monthly data from 0ct 2015 to June 2016)

While there are clearly seasonal fluctuations, the relative stability of this chart (each year has approximately the same pattern) highlights that the rate of trips per station remains consistent, even as new stations are added to the system. This bodes well that ridership will continue to increase as new stations are added to the system.

We can similarly track the growth of the Bike Share fleet. Each bike in the system is assigned a unique ID, and for any particular month, we can count how many of these unique IDs there are in the ridership data. It is unclear to us whether Bike Share Toronto stores bikes during periods of low ridership, or if the bikes remain idle at the stations, or both.

Number of Bikes in Operation

(data only available from 2019 onwards)

Trips Per Bike

(data only available from 2019 onwards)

Average bike usage indicates how many times bikes are used on average each month. Typically, average bike usage exceeds 30 rides per month starting in April (approximately one ride per day). In 2020, average bike usage did not surpass 30 rides per day until May due to COVID-19, which resulted in decreased Bike Share usage. Normally, about half the year bikes are used more than twice per day.

This content was built using Svelte and D3. Code is on GitHub. More to come soon!