A few weeks ago, I wrote a rather flawed post that tried to piece together how BIXI bike-sharing was doing in Toronto based on Steve Obrien's interactive usage map. My initial conclusion as to the success of the program proved to be somewhat hasty, but new stats obtained from BIXI by Global News indicate that there is indeed reason to be cautiously optimistic about the first month of bike-sharing in Toronto.

According to BIXI, 64,500 total trips have been taken since the May 3rd launch, 28,830 of which were taken last week alone. To put that into a daily perspective, assuming the program's been around for 28 days (based on a May 3rd launch date), that'd average out at about 2,300 trips a day. When one considers just how abysmal the weather was throughout the month, that seems pretty good.

It's difficult, however, to extrapolate how many trips per bike are taking place on a daily basis because the size of the fleet has increased over the course of May. Based on O'Brien's overnight dock stats, it looks like there are about 780 bikes available for rental now, compared to about 400 on May 9th. As such, trustworthy comparisons to other cities are probably best left until all of the bikes and docks we're due to get are installed.

Nevertheless, those looking for positive signs regarding usage rates need only consider the trend indicated by the second of the stats revealed in the Global report: 28,830 trips taken last week. Should this trend of increased ridership continue, it might be possible to drop the "cautiously" and just be optimistic about BIXI in Toronto.

Photo by Theodropham in the blogTO Flickr pool.