If Bixi soaking up tens of millions of taxpayer dollars wasn’t enough, Montrealers recently learned that the city-owned bicycle-sharing service used creative accounting to exaggerate grossly its membership tally. Ironically, the disclosure helps to show that Bixi’s current state isn’t as bad as you might think.

Back in 2012, Bixi announced it had reached 49,227 members, tantalizingly close to the 50,000 users Bixi said it needed to break even. At the time, money was running out and a key partner had filed a $26-million lawsuit. Bixi badly needed some good news. So, it made some up.

The 49,227 figure was a lie. In fact, only 36,277 people were actually members, a fact that Bixi’s new administration admitted this past summer. The old bosses had cooked up the bigger number (a 36% bump up from reality) by including 13,000 Bixi keys that had been distributed but never activated.

As of August 2014, Bixi had 33,715 members.

That’s still an impressive figure. It shows that despite a constant flow of negative news – millions of dollars lost, bankruptcy protection, fears that the service would shut down – and a rainy start to the season, Montrealers are still on the Bixi bandwagon.

Bixi’s big expenses are behind it. The tens of millions of dollars that the city blew on Bixi – even city hall isn’t sure quite how much it lost – were due to the cost of developing the groundbreaking bicycle-sharing system and selling it to cities around the world. The international part of Bixi was sold to a private company during the bankruptcy process in the spring.

Montreal now owns only its local operations. Running a bicycle-sharing program on city streets isn’t a huge burden to a city with a $5-billion budget.

In 2012, according to audited figures, Bixi had a local operating deficit of $1.5 million, in a season in which 4.4 million trips were taken. That means each trip was subsidized to the tune of 34¢. If you include depreciation in that year’s loss, the subsidy amounts to 91¢ per trip, notes La Presse columnist François Cardinal. Both figures are less than the roughly $1.44-per-ride subsidy Montreal’s transit agency gets.

Using that comparison, Bixi doesn’t look so bad, especially as it provides other benefits. The service has helped to spark a cycling revolution, encouraging more commuters to adopt a healthier way to get around, and the city to invest in better paths. With Bixi racks at many métro stations, the service also has cut the number of people taking the subway, reducing overcrowding.

Bixi’s new city-appointed board – experts on finance, governance and cycling – has cut back on expenses. For example, Bixi no longer relies upon an outside company to redistribute bikes in its network; instead, Bixi does that work in-house, a change that results in “substantial savings.”

Bixi is on probation in 2014. Montreal’s new mayor, Denis Coderre, a Bixi skeptic, says he’ll decide whether the service survives based on the 2014 season, which ends Nov. 15.

If Coderre sets aside Bixi’s sorry history and thinks of sharing bicycles as an extension of public transit, he’ll realize it is not a bad deal.

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