How did Bixi do in its first year in Toronto?

Like proud parents, we can’t believe Bixi, the bike rental service and bona fide reason to love Toronto, is a year old already. Over the past year, Bixi has worked out some initial hiccups and extended its initial reach to Bathurst, the Distillery District, and along Sherbourne, just in time for the winter cycling season. (Toronto may not be the first Canadian city to have a bike rental network, but it is the first Canadian system available year-round—take that Montreal!). Maybe it was the unnaturally mild winter or the rising ranks of the city’s pinko cyclists, but stats show 23,000 trips were taken in winter, accounting for about 22% of the first year of usage. Altogether, BIXI met its goal of attracting 5,000 members and Torontonians took more than 556,000 trips around the downtown core. Sure we’d still like a larger service area, but that’s not bad for a city whose mayor has been accused of waging a war on bikes. [Newswire.ca]