I rode a bike Friday for the first time in — I don’t know, five years? Six? More?

It was fun, the old familiar exercise in the legs, the air in my face, the glide along the lake shore in the sunshine. The old axiom is true, I hadn’t forgotten how to ride. But I had forgotten at least a bit the feeling of exhilaration pumping along at a decent clip can bring. I expect it’s a feeling I’ll become reacquainted with soon.

Because the city’s Bike Share program, as Mayor John Tory announced Thursday, is expanding, and they finally put a location near my home.

That’s good news for me. And while I’m not necessarily typical of every resident of Toronto, I think it’s probably good news for a growing number of Torontonians too, which is good news for the likely success of the program and for the general state of moving people around Toronto.

Something like the Bike Share program, versions of which have been very successful in other cities, usefully fill a gap in the city’s cycling network. There are many people, including tourists but also those whose main mode of commuter transportation is the car or public transit, who are not going to be hardcore cyclists. But they may want or be able to ride sometimes, for pleasure, or for short trips to the store, or on their way to the subway, or whatever, who will ride if it’s convenient and inexpensive.

A network of bikes you can borrow all over the core of the city accomplishes that. The larger the network, and the more locations, the more convenient it is, and the more people will take advantage of it.

For example, years ago I tried riding a bike to work a few times, but the ride was long (about an hour) and I felt too tired at the end of some days to face it, and too sweaty arriving at work after riding it on other days. But my transit commute is kind of long too (45 minutes to an hour). I could take the UPX to work, cutting my commute time in half, but I live a slightly-too-long-to-walk distance from the station, and transferring from a TTC bus adds expense and time and hassle.

Now, there’s a Bike Share station near my house, and another right at the UPX station. I’ll be taking advantage of that, to my own benefit, and also to the benefit of those who I’d otherwise be sharing the overcrowded subway lines with.

Again, I’m not necessarily typical, but I suspect there are people all over the central city, out into East York now, who have similar new opportunities to take advantage of the system.

It has a cost, of course. This expansion costs $7.5 million, and the system has relied on an operating subsidy. But I think it is well worth it — and thought that before this expansion made the system particularly useful to me. We already subsidize car travel through our maintenance of the roads and on-street parking infrastructure to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. We pour an equivalent amount into operating subsidies for public transit. Those are just the costs of moving people.

But it’s especially useful to invest in bike infrastructure — both bikeways and Bike Share — at a time where the central automobile and subway networks are both essentially full. If you want to move more people, bikes offer a relatively cheap and easy way to do so that can actually relieve the congestion on the other modes.

Councillor Paul Ainslie complained in a statement Friday that, as a supporter of the program, he was disappointed to see the expansion not reach into Scarborough. Indeed, North York and Etobicoke are similarly left off the Bike Share map. I think there’s potentially a lot of riders in those more spread-out areas of the city, who might like the option to cycle to the mall, or to their large area parks, or as a “last-mile” option to transit. That ought to be the next frontier of Bike Share, though the logistics of serving an area that is more spread out may be more difficult. Certainly large apartment clusters on main streets would be well-served by bike sharing stations, but the nature of strip-mall and mall development and large, sprawling residential subdivisions may require some rethinking of the dock system, and of limits on use to a half-hour at a time.

Those are things worth thinking about. I’m optimistic that the Bike Share program can continue to grow, and be more useful. This recent expansion means it’s more useful to me immediately. The more people who can say that, the better off we’ll all be.