Disability Advocates to Press Toronto’s Infrastructure and Environment Committee Today to Say Yes to New Micromobility Options But a Resounding No to Electric Scooters that Endanger Vulnerable People with Disabilities and Seniors

ACCESSIBILITY FOR ONTARIANS WITH DISABILITIES ACT ALLIANCE

 

NEWS RELEASE – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 

Disability Advocates to Press Toronto’s Infrastructure and Environment Committee Today to Say Yes to New Micromobility Options But a Resounding No to Electric Scooters that Endanger Vulnerable People with Disabilities and Seniors

 

May 2, 2024 Toronto: On Thursday May 2, 2024, just after 9:30 am, the grassroots AODA Alliance will make an in-person deputation to Toronto City Council’s Infrastructure and Environment Committee, urging the city not to lift the ban on riding electric scooters in public. Disability advocates will tell the Committee that City Council must not unleash a pilot program of dangerous electric scooters. The meeting will be livestreamed on YouTube.

 

“City Council should not conduct an e-scooter pilot. A pilot to study what? How many innocent people will be injured? We already know they will be from cities that allow them,” said David Lepofsky, Chair of the non-partisan AODA Alliance who will address the Toronto Infrastructure and Environment Committee. “Toronto residents and visitors should not be forced to be unwilling guinea pigs in such a human experiment, especially without our consent.”

 

Experience in city after city shows that e-scooters, a silent menace, endanger public safety in places that allow them. Riders and innocent pedestrians get seriously injured or killed. They especially endanger vulnerable seniors and people with disabilities. Blind people can’t know when silent e-scooters rocket at them at over 20 KPH, driven by unlicensed, untrained, uninsured, unhelmeted, fun-seeking joyriders. Often left strewn on sidewalks, e-scooters are dangerous tripping hazards for blind people and accessibility nightmares for wheelchair users.

 

It accomplishes nothing to ban e-scooters only from sidewalks. The silent menace of e-scooters continues as they are frequently ridden on sidewalks in cities that ban them only from sidewalks. We’d need cops on every block.

 

The AODA Alliance’s plea is entirely supported by a strong new City Staff Report, a similarly strong earlier 2021 City Staff Report, the unanimous May 5, 2021 Toronto City Council vote not to allow e-scooters, and three strong recommendations by Toronto’s official Accessibility Advisory Committee passed in 2020, 2021 and 2024. It is also supported by a compelling open letter to Toronto City Council signed by at least 21 community organizations.

 

In 2020, the AODA Alliance exposed the well-funded, behind-the-scenes feeding frenzy of backroom pressure that corporate lobbyists for e-scooter rental companies inundated Toronto City Hall with for months. They do this in city after city.

 

“The corporate lobbyists want to make money on e-scooter rentals, laughing all the way to the bank as injured pedestrians sob all the way to hospital,” said Lepofsky. “We call on Toronto City Council to again stand up for people with disabilities and to stand up to the e-scooter corporate lobbyists.”

 

On the meeting’s second agenda item, the AODA Alliance will call on the Infrastructure and Environment Committee to immediately halt the City’s construction of dangerous new bike paths that are situated on top of sidewalks, not at road level. Last fall, a widely viewed AODA Alliance online video revealed that the City of Toronto built a new bike path directly on a midtown Eglinton Avenue West sidewalk that seriously endangers blind pedestrians. For Toronto to establish a new bike path right on the sidewalk, and not at road level, obviously endangers blind pedestrians who have no way of knowing they’re straying into a bike path.

 

The AODA Alliance will call on Toronto to remove such dangers and prevent them from being created in the future. Toronto is required by Ontario law to become accessible and barrier-free to Ontarians with disabilities by 2025. Toronto should not treat people with disabilities as expendable second-class citizens.

 

Contact: AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky, aodafeedback@gmail.com

Twitter: @aodaalliance

 

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