If you’re reading this from within the city limits of Ontario’s provincial capital, there are very good odds you’ve witnessed law-breaking on the streets of Toronto recently. Not the banal, everyday kind of lawbreaking that is the result of Toronto police having stopped even pretending to consistently enforce the Highway Traffic Act. No, I’m talking about something far more sinister: electric scooters, which are illegal in Toronto and, if city staff have their way, will remain so.
This might be slightly confusing to anyone who’s been outdoors at all in this city in the past few years, since e-scooters are common (if not ubiquitous). But under provincial rules, they’re illegal unless municipalities specifically opt in to a provincial pilot program. We’ve discussed the problems with Ontario’s reliance on pilot programs in this area of policy before, and those criticisms stand. Toronto council isn’t responsible for the problems caused by provincial timidity, but it is responsible for the choices it makes within that framework.
So it was disappointing to see that Toronto staff are recommending that council stick with its current refusal to legalize e-scooters, citing potential risks to public safety (more on that in a moment) and conflicts with existing road users, both drivers and non-drivers alike. Meanwhile, staff are recommending the city opt in to the provincial pilot for low-speed vehicles — basically, miniature electric cars incapable of reaching highways speeds.
To be clear, I’m a fan of electric LSVs and have been for much longer than either the province or municipality. But they barely exist as a commuting choice in Ontario and not solely because of the confusing hodge-podge of provincial and local regulations. An LSV is still a car, and there’s no plausible reality in which LSV use won’t be encumbered by many of the same requirements, such as licensing and insurance, that we impose on all other cars. Additionally, an LSV delivers substantially less vehicle for the cost; in many cases, people looking for a bargain would be better off simply buying a used car. I’m all for legalizing them, but we shouldn’t pretend that they’re going to transform the mobility market in Toronto.
E-scooters, though, are exploding in popularity in spite of the fact that they’re currently prohibited here. They’re vastly cheaper than an LSV and, indeed, cheaper even than e-bikes. They offer high-ish-speed commuting options in good weather (and even in bad, if you can change at work). They’re succeeding in the most basic way: people actually like them and are buying them.
From the perspective of city staff, that popularity is a bug, not a feature. The staff presentation includes a litany of sins committed by e-scooter users, such as conflicts with pedestrians and fire risks associated with batteries. But those risks are present with other modes of travel as well, including e-bikes. (It makes one wonder whether Toronto would prohibit e-bikes if the province gave them the option, a question that it is probably best not to dwell on.)
The more unique and humorous (in context) objection to e-scooters from city staff is that the city’s road maintenance has been so poor in the recent past that e-scooter riders pose an enhanced liability risk to the city by way of personal-injury lawsuits. That’s a hell of an admission if we take it at face value: the city is asserting that it has so abundantly failed at one of its core duties — maintaining roads — that the streets are not safe for a type of vehicle that’s legal in cities directly adjacent to us, including Mississauga, Brampton, and Durham Region.
To put it bluntly, I don’t think Toronto’s stated reasons for opposing e-scooters ought to be taken seriously. There’s good reason to believe that injuries from e-scooters are overstated; a recent analysis from Rutgers University found that, in the United States, e-scooter riders were no more likely to face serious injuries. I’m more sympathetic to the objections to shared, app-based e-scooter fleets given the substantial record of bad behaviour by those companies — abandoned scooters are often simply discarded on sidewalks or elsewhere in the public right-of-way. That’s a clear and easy line for policymakers to draw.
More fundamentally, this is another case of Toronto being Toronto in the worst way. It took literally years of organized public pressure to legalize drinking alcohol in (some) public parks even as everyone acknowledged the city was enforcing its rules inconsistently and unfairly. It took decades after amalgamation for Toronto to legalize rooming houses city-wide, even as everyone acknowledged the only thing the prohibition in much of the city accomplished was keeping rooming-house tenants in a black market where their safety was at risk. Now leadership is faced with a novel technology that is clean, cheap, and wildly popular, but their instinct is to prohibit it and insist that, if they shout loudly enough, reality will bend to their whims.
It's the city giving in to its own worst instincts again, having apparently applied none of the lessons of previous cases to current events. Council should override the staff recommendations, opt in to the provincial pilot program, and then use the same measures it intends to use for e-bikes and couriers (enforcement and public-education blitzes) to handle the legitimate conflicts that also occur with e-scooters. But I suspect we’ll be stuck with this prohibition, at least nominally, for some time to come. Toronto city council wouldn’t let something as trivial as reality disrupt their carefully cultivated shared delusions.
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