He desperately wanted to make use of the city's bicycle share system to travel the 10 kilometres to and from his workplace.

"If you go to Toronto and you wanted to use the bike share system, you have to live in the downtown core."

Anyone in Toronto's Bloordale neighbourhood, where Delgado settled in, would have to walk 30-40 minutes just to reach the nearest bike share rack station.

The bike share network in Toronto is looking to expand, but each rack, with its payment terminal and self-locking slots for each bike, can cost thousands of dollars to install.

"It's a really high capital investment," Delgado said. "If you look at Bike Share Toronto itself, it actually went bankrupt because of its inefficiencies."

Bixi, the Montreal-based parent of the Toronto bike sharing service, gave up its control of the network to the City of Toronto in early 2014 after declaring bankruptcy. The bike sharing network is now controlled by the Toronto Parking Authority.

So Delgado started coding Bykme, a web-based application that allows bicycle owners to offer their bikes to others for rent.

"We're in an era of sharing stuff, sharing assets — AirBnB, Lyft, Uber — so it just seemed natural to me that we should share our bikes," Delgado said. "There's such a large supply of bikes in Toronto and it's growing here as well, so it's just rational that people should start monetizing their bicycles."

Using Paypal, the service costs owners of bikes a 10 per cent commission of the rent they charge, which goes to Delgado. Paypal charges 30 cents plus 2.9 per cent of the value of each transaction.

Renters pick up bikes from a location chosen by the owner. Seven bikes and one unicycle were listed on BykMe on Friday, with rental cost ranging from $5 per day to $60 per day for a high-end road bike.

"Someone who I'm constantly thinking about (for BykMe) is an international student who doesn't want to have a bike," Delgado said. "They're going to want to use a bike periodically, on a daily basis."

As an added incentive to use the service, Delgado was introduced to Cowan Insurance Group by Communitech, and is figuring out how to develop a policy to cover bikes offered for rent.

"We'd cover any transaction on the system for theft, damage or loss," Delgado said, adding he and Cowan are still working on the details.

For now, he said he'd cover the cost of any stolen bike out of his own pocket.

The Community Access Bike Share program offers bicycles for rent at racks in Wilfrid Laurier University, uptown Waterloo and downtown Kitchener. A membership costs $40 for seven months.

A competing network, Grand River Public Bike Share, hopes to set up the first three of its bike racks sometime in April.

Delgado said "he's after a different user group" than bike sharing services that have physical stations holding racks of shareable bikes.

"The vast majority of (people who use bike sharing services) are people who want to go from point A to point B, without necessarily returning to point A using the same (transportation) method."

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To truly render the common bike share network obsolete, Delgado said he wants to develop hardware that would allow users to leave rented bikes locked up anywhere they wish when their trip is complete, so that the next user could unlock the bike using wireless and Bluetooth technology.

Delgado has little competition in the region, but California-based Spinlister is already operating an app-based brokerage for bikes, surfboards and snowboards in 100 countries around the world. It lists bikes in Toronto, as well as a few in Guelph.

"I've been studying their company to see where I can improve."