AODA Alliance
Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance Update
United for a Barrier-Free Ontario for All People with Disabilities
Website: www.aodaalliance.org
Email: aodafeedback@gmail.com
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Municipal Election Action Kit — Ask Candidates for City Council or Mayor Anywhere in Ontario to Pledge to Tear Down Disability Barriers in Your City or Town and Not to Create New Disability Barriers
September 8, 2026
SUMMARY
Municipal elections in Ontario take place on Monday, October 26, 2026. Ontarians will vote for their next mayors and members of city council. Ontarians with disabilities need your help in this election.
In recent years, Ontario municipalities have been progressively getting less accessible to and more dangerous for people with disabilities. The Ontario Human Rights Code, the Charter of Rights and the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act require the reverse. The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act requires Ontario to become accessible to people with disabilities by 2025. Creating new barriers flies in the face of that requirement.
This Action Kit outlines three ways this is happening, and give you action tips to raise these issues in this municipal election campaign. Ask any and every candidate for mayor or City Council member in your community to make the “Municipal Disability Accessibility Pledge, including:
- No e-scooters
- No scramble intersections and
- No bike paths on the sidewalk.
We also encourage you to raise your own disability issues, using our strategies or any others that you invent. As always, our non-partisan coalition does not support or oppose any candidates. We try to get the strongest commitments on accessibility from them all.
1. Don’t Allow Electric Scooters
Ask your municipal candidates to commit not to allow electric scooters in public places, such as roads, parks or sidewalks. Ask them to commit to vigorously enforcing the law.
In Ontario, people with disabilities are endangered by electric scooters racing silently at high speeds on sidewalks, roads and park paths. These create twin dangers for people with disabilities, seniors, children and others.
A silent menace, e-scooters, appearing out of nowhere, are ridden on sidewalks in Ottawa and other cities that ban them from sidewalks. Uninsured, unlicensed, untrained, unhelmeted joy-riders, racing at 20 or more KPH, endanger the safety of innocent pedestrians, especially people who can’t see them coming or quickly dodge them. Left strewn on sidewalks, e-scooters have been tripping hazards for blind people. They are an accessibility nightmare for wheelchair users.
Many news reports around the world document very serious injuries that e-scooters have caused. Several major disability organizations, as well as several municipal accessibility advisory committees have called on city after city to not allow e-scooters, and to effectively enforce any bans on them that are in force.
Despite this, some Ontario cities like Ottawa continue to allow e-scooters, egged on by their City staff. Other cities like Toronto have not allowed them, but are not fully and effectively enforcing the ban on riding them in public. In Toronto, e-scooters are frequently ridden public as if they were perfectly legal. Toronto Police have undertaken a few helpful but short blitzes to enforce the law, warning and charging a number of e-scooter riders. The public needs much more of this.
Quite a number of people own their own e-scooters and ride them in public. Some may not have a clue that they are breaking the law. Some parents let their children ride them, without even ensuring they wear a helmet, all contrary to the law.
There is nothing in place to stop stores from selling e-scooters to the public, even when it is illegal to ride them in public in most parts of Ontario. In some cities, people can also rent e-scooters.
Corporate lobbyists for e-scooter rental companies have kept up a massive feeding frenzy of lobbying city councils. They laugh all the way to the bank, while victims of e-scooter injuries sob all the way to their hospital’s over-crowded emergency ward. In this election, we expect those corporate lobbyists to again be bombarding municipal candidates with their attempts to extract commitments to widely unleash e-scooters on the public.
There is overwhelming proof that it’s not good enough to just ban e-scooters from sidewalks. In every city that has banned e-scooters from sidewalks but allowed them on the roads, people still keep riding e-scooters on sidewalks. No city can afford to have a cop on every sidewalk to police those weak half-measures.
We are talking about the motorized kick-style scooters that a person stands on to ride. We of course seek no restrictions on mobility assistance devices for people with disabilities, such as the very different powered scooters on which a person sits when riding them.
Ottawa is an especially dangerous place due to e-scooters. It has allowed e-scooters for six years, over the strong objections from disability community.
The 7-year campaign against e-scooters in which the AODA Alliance has been a key player is documented on the AODA Alliance website’s www.aodaalliance.org/e-scooters
2. Don’t Allow Dangerous “Scramble Intersections”
It is important to press municipal candidates to commit at the very least that no more scramble intersections will be established. We need to stop and reverse this trend.
The City of Toronto has converted several important urban intersections into “scramble intersections” and is planning to implement more of them. These are very harmful for pedestrians with disabilities. As too often has happened in the past, the needs of people with disabilities were not properly considered, if they were considered at all.
A scramble intersection is an intersection with traffic lights that does not operate like any other intersection. During one phase of the traffic signal cycle, all vehicles must stop from all directions. Pedestrians can then cross freely in any direction, including diagonally, across the intersection.
The traffic lights go through a cycle. There will be a pedestrian-only phase. Then there will be a vehicle traffic phase going north-south. After that will be a vehicle traffic phase with vehicles going east-west. Depending on the design, pedestrians may or may not be allowed to cross during an east-west or north-south vehicle traffic phase.
A scramble intersection is supposed to make things easier for safe pedestrian and vehicle traffic flow. However, it creates serious barriers for pedestrians with disabilities, such as:
- For blind and low vision pedestrians, it creates navigation chaos, removing the vital sounds of traffic patterns needed to safely navigate across an intersection. It can add further complications for guide dog users. The presence of audible pedestrian signals at these intersections don’t solve this mess.
- For pedestrians with mobility disabilities, curb cuts may not properly accommodate them. Time for crossing the intersection may not be sufficient.
- For pedestrians with cognitive disabilities, it can add safety and independent navigation difficulties.
3. Do Not Build Bike Paths on a Sidewalk
It is also important to press municipal candidates to commit to never build bike paths on the sidewalk.
Toronto as well is the site of dangerous new bike paths that were built on the sidewalk, rather than on the road level. The AODA Alliance generated extensive public attention to this new disability barrier when it released a widely viewed video depicting this danger for pedestrians with disabilities. After that video came out, Toronto built more of these, and removed none that it had earlier built.
4. How You Can Help
Each of these three safety issues is serious. The danger to people with disabilities multiplies when these issues are added together.
For example, they all converge at Toronto’s central Yonge and Eglinton intersection. Toronto harmfully decided to convert this into a scramble intersection next year. This must be stopped. There are e-scooters endangering pedestrians around that intersection as elsewhere in Toronto with practical impunity even though Toronto City Council voted twice to ban e-scooters from the city, largely due to advocacy from the disability community. The dangerous sidewalk-level bike path depicted in the AODA Alliance’s widely publicized video starts at this intersection.
Let municipal candidates know that these issues of safety and accessibility matters to you! Ask any and every candidate for mayor or City Council member in your community to make the “Municipal Disability Accessibility Pledge, which, once again, includes:
- No e-scooters.
- No scramble intersections and
- No bike paths on the sidewalk.
Please spread the word about these issues. Urge friends and family members to call on any candidates for mayor or city council in the October 26, 2022 Ontario municipal elections to make the “No Disability Barriers Pledge!”
Let us know what commitments you get from candidates. Email us at aodafeedback@gmail.com
Want to learn more about how to do effective advocacy on disability issues? Check out the AODA Alliance’s podcast: “Disability Rights and Wrongs — The David Lepodcast” available wherever you get your podcasts, except not on YouTube.
Also, take a peak at the new online lecture series by AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky on practical tips for social justice advocacy.