Abstract Manager

In 2024, Bike Share Toronto retained Mott MacDonald and Take Consulting to develop a five-year expansion plan for its network of standard and electric bicycle docks, whose locations throughout the city support hundreds of thousands of trips each month. The plan was required to satisfy four strategic objectives: grow ridership, increase recreational use, improve connectivity to rail transit, and promote fair and inclusive access to the bike share network. To identify the optimal locations for installing approximately 250 new docking stations, Mott MacDonald and Take Consulting conducted a geospatial suitability analysis, scoring each area of the city according to its potential to achieve each strategic objective. The scores were then weighed and combined to produce a visualization illustrating which areas of the city should be prioritized for the installation of a new station.

This work provides a valuable case study for exploring decision-making at multiple scales. The strategic objectives drew from Bike Share Toronto's previous four-year plan, but were refined through consultation to reflect the maturity of its network and feedback from member surveys. Further refinement was driven by limits in the availability of geospatial data and the constraints of budget and time, highlighting the tension between an imagined ideal analysis and an achievable one. Decision-making at this middle scale concerned methodology: identifying appropriate proxy measures for each objective and choosing weights to reflect their importance. The lowest level of decision-making concerned individual GIS tools and their inputs.

Even when the analysis was complete, decisions remained. How should Bike Share Toronto weigh each of the four strategic objectives? Should it prioritize geographic expansion or densification of its existing network? In broader terms, who should it serve and why? Such questions highlight the importance of clearly defining objectives and values to guide decision-making before, during, and after the analysis, including assessment to ensure that results align with purpose. Equally important is who decides. Corresponding to the spectrum of decision-making on the project, high-level goal and methodology choices were resolved through discussion while lower-level data processing choices were delegated to the analyst.