Certain parts of my body instinctively clench when I hear French Canadians discussing street furniture. I learned this about myself on a Friday morning in October, when the Toronto Cyclists Union and the Toronto Coalition for Active Transportation presented something called “Bixi” for a demonstration at the southeast corner of Bloor and Spadina. Bixi is Montreal’s new public bike-sharing service, initiated, funded and managed by that city’s parking authority; it will recoup its costs through 10 years’ worth of membership and rental fees, rendering the enterprise revenue-neutral for the city.

Such innovation is alien to Toronto’s public sector, the default modus operandi of which is not to think outside the box but rather to outsource the design, manufacture and ownership of the box to a billboard company which will then get to slather ads on it.

Which returns me to my tension: after spending a good amount of time (unsuccessfully) campaigning against Mayor Miller’s plan to award a street furniture contract — a 20-year deal for the provision and control of transit shelters, garbage bins, advertising kiosks and similar items — to inexperienced Montreal-based billboard giant Astral Media Outdoor, I had unwittingly become conditioned to view the accented discussion of infrastructure negatively.

Just as I was learning to relax, however, and coming to accept that, yes, Bixi might just be as miraculous a public project as it seemed, word filtered through the grapevine: Councillor Adrian Heaps, chair of the Toronto Cycling Committee, had already unilaterally decided that, with regard to Toronto’s future bike-sharing program, Astral Media is the way to go. The trouble is that, without a proper exploration of Toronto’s options, this is a monomania from which no one would emerge with the best possible arrangement: not Torontonians, not the city and possibly not even Astral.

It comes down to the “right of first refusal.”  Heaps and his staff have stated on the record that Astral has this privilege with regard to new Toronto street furniture, including a bikesharing program. This is not true. Even if you accept the premise that bikesharing counts as street furniture, Astral’s right of first refusal only extends to future elements that would have advertising.

Are you sure, I asked Councillor Heaps, that Astral has the right of first refusal on all new street furniture in Toronto, regardless of whether it would carry advertising? Yes, he replied, that’s what’s written into the contract.

The thing is that, unlike the councillor, I have a copy of the contract, and that’s not what it says.
Now Heaps is a really nice guy who’s passionate and just wants these new bikes on the road, but that doesn’t change the fact that the contract only says that although “The City agrees that it shall not itself implement nor operate and shall not... authorize any other advertising program on any other Street Furniture element,” Astral “agrees that nothing in this Agreement shall prevent the City from authorizing a future Street Furniture element program which does not include advertising.”

The confusion was likely a result of another part of the contract, which says that “The Company [i.e. Astral] agrees that the City may require the Company to undertake programs for the exploration and implementation of new street furniture opportunities, with or without advertising, at fair market value to the City, provided that where such programs cannot be provided by the Company at fair market value, the City shall be entitled to undertake such programs with a third party.”

In other words: the city can require Astral to undertake things like a bike-sharing program, but there’s nothing stopping the city from doing it on its own or with another company, unless they’re planning on having advertising on the items.

Indeed, that is the path most cities go. Clear Channel Outdoor (a US-based advertising behemoth) and JCDecaux (a France-based advertising behemoth) use bike-sharing programs as loss-leaders to entice municipalities the world over into handing them lucrative monopolies on street furniture or billboards. Toronto, however, having already handed over its street furniture (and not possessing the power to regulate billboards), has the luxury of examining various bike-sharing options on their own merits. Picking a vendor because it’s conveniently on-hand is perhaps not the smartest way to build infrastructure.

The city’s Transportation Services division is, for its part, “pulling in information from all over about what other municipalities have done,” according to Kyp Perikleous, who manages the street-furniture program for the city. “The decision of which model we’re going with has not yet been made,” he assures me. “It all depends whether council would want to put up the kind of money Montreal did.”

What’s happened is that Heaps has given Astral a head start and, potentially, a competitive advantage. At the end of October, he delivered them a framework for what he is looking for, and offered them city research and data to assist in preparing a proposal. He’s “asked them to come back in January” but will wait until the “end of February to announce something publicly” and they “will have something in place by summer ’09” in the form of a limited pilot project.

Considering that Clear Channel’s and Decaux’s bike-sharing programs operate at a loss, what would Astral get out of it? According to Heaps, they’re “enthusiastic,” but it’s not yet clear “whether it’s a business model or an exercise in philanthropy.”

Jean-Francois Nion, Executive Vice President of JCDecaux North America, tells me, “To make money, you would have to charge the public a large fee, which would be counterproductive.” Alternatively, Astral could amend its contract in order to reduce its regular monetary payments to the city in exchange for the service. “Once you’ve got the contract, it’s easier to negotiate with the city,” Nion says. Given that Astral overbid for the contract (and that Decaux didn’t bid specifically because the city wanted money instead of services), this might be a backwards way of arriving at the same arrangement that Clear Channel and Decaux would have liked in the first place.

When the Transportation Services report goes to council early next year and says, well, you could invest money into this and get it back in a decade, or you can put out a tender and see who bites, or you can go with this complete, ready proposal we have right here, what do you think is going to happen?

We’ll be whistling Bixi about what might have been.

Jonathan Goldsbie is a campaigner with the Toronto Public Space Committee.