Bike Share Toronto

Beginning in 2023, Urban Minds has been collaborating with Bike Share Toronto as part of a consultant team led by O2 Planning and Design to engage communities in expanding the bike share system into new neighbourhoods. The initiative is part of the Toronto Parking Authority’s Four-Year Growth Plan to establish 1,000 stations by 2025, aiming to bridge mobility gaps in historically underserved communities.

The engagement strategy focused on equity, experience mapping, education, and evaluation, employing methods like interviews with community leaders, hiring community animators, workshops, pop-up events, and public surveys. This inclusive approach ensured feedback from equity-deserving communities and provided resources in multiple languages. Our objectives were to gather diverse resident input for station planning, promote long-term ridership through education and information sharing, and build lasting relationships for ongoing education and engagement.

Our team led the design of the pop-up engagement with the objective of making the activity fun, interactive, mobile, and accessible while ensuring the public’s input was informative to the technical process of station planning. We invited participants to use wooden skewers to identify regular destinations in the community on a large map, then insert colour-coded beads through the skewers to indicate their current modes of transportation to access these locations. Simple, colourful, and tactile, this activity prompted many conversations between participants and the project team on the opportunities and challenges regarding the use of bike share in the community.