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
Twitter: @aodaalliance
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/aodaalliance
Please Email the City of Toronto to Support New AODA Alliance Brief that Calls for Toronto to Say No to Electric Scooters that Endanger People with Disabilities
February 29, 2024
SUMMARY
Last summer, Toronto City Council directed City staff to prepare a report on whether Toronto should conduct pilot projects with different kinds of micromobility devices, such as e-scooters. The AODA Alliance has just submitted a detailed brief to Toronto City staff. It calls for Toronto to continue to ban people from riding e-scooters in public. Our brief urges Toronto to at long last effectively enforce that ban.
Below is a short summary of our brief. You can read that entire brief at February 29, 2024 AODA Alliance brief to the City of Toronto
We oppose the silent menace of those stand-up kick-style e-scooters. We of course do not oppose any mobility devices that help people with disabilities get around.
How You Can Help
Please email the City of Toronto Staff and Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow. Please tell them to say no to riding e-scooters in public places in Toronto. Please endorse the February 29, 2024, brief to Toronto on e-scooters.
Our accessibility campaign never stops, or even slows down!
You can email City of Toronto staff at micromobility@toronto.ca
You can email Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow at Mayor_Chow@toronto.ca
It helps for you to email them even if you live outside Toronto, since you would be endangered by e-scooters should you visit the city.
If you live in Toronto and want to do even more, write your member of City Council too.
Where to Get More Background
- The February 29, 2024 AODA Alliance brief to the City of Toronto opposing e-scooters.
- The open letter to Toronto City Council, opposing e-scooters, sent by 22 disability and community organizations.
- The AODA Alliance website’s e-scooter page.
MORE DETAILS
Summary of the AODA Alliance’s February 29, 2024 Brief to the City of Toronto on Electric Scooters
- E-scooters are a silent menace, ridden by unhelmetted, untrained, unlicensed and uninsured joyriders. E-scooters cause an increase in personal injuries, including serious personal injuries to innocent pedestrians and e-scooter riders, which further burdens Toronto’s overloaded hospital emergency rooms. Making this worse, their batteries can spontaneously catch fire.
- If Toronto permits e-scooters, this will create new serious accessibility barriers impeding people with disabilities. This will happen especially in public places like sidewalks where they will be left strewn about, as in other cities that permit e-scooters. They are a tripping hazard for blind people. They block accessible paths of travel for people using wheelchairs, walkers, or strollers. Toronto already has far too many accessibility barriers in public places and has been getting less disability accessible. E-scooters would make this even worse still.
- Having been forewarned of these dangers, for the City of Toronto to lift the ban on e-scooters would expose the City to major claims for knowingly endangering Toronto’s residents and knowingly creating new accessibility barriers against persons with disabilities. For Toronto to do so knowingly is the same as doing so intentionally.
- If Toronto allows e-scooters but bans them from sidewalks, e-scooters will nevertheless regularly be ridden on Toronto sidewalks, as shown by experience in other cities. This would endanger innocent pedestrians.
- Toronto lacks the law enforcement capacity to effectively police nuanced new rules regarding e-scooters, such as a ban on riding or parking them on sidewalks. It is easier and costs less to enforce a ban on riding e-scooters in public.
- Toronto City staff has found no other city that has found an effective way to permit and regulate e-scooters and to effectively enforce those regulations.
- Lifting the ban on e-scooters will inflict new financial burdens on the taxpayer, such as added health care costs due to e-scooter injuries, cost of added infrastructure to accommodate e-scooters, added law enforcement costs, added regulatory and monitoring costs, and legal liabilities triggered by e-scooters.
- Over the past four years, Toronto City Council has received strong united opposition to e-scooters from the disability community, reflecting the needs of vulnerable people with disabilities and seniors. This includes three successive compelling unanimous resolutions against e-scooters by the Toronto Accessibility Advisory Committee, strong opposition by many respected disability community organizations, passionate deputations against e-scooters by persons with disabilities presenting to City Council committees and emails and phone calls to the mayor and City Council members from many people with disabilities and their supporters.
- In disregard of these serious dangers, a relentless push for e-scooters in Toronto has been mounted by corporate lobbyists for e-scooter rental companies. They have unleashed an extensive, well-financed and well-connected lobbying feeding frenzy at City Hall.
- The e-scooter corporate lobbyists’ entire campaign is based on the erroneous assertion that rental e-scooters will significantly reduce traffic and pollution, because instead of driving, people will take public transit, and then rent an e-scooter to ride the last mile to their destinations. Yet the vast majority of e-scooter rides are NOT taken to connect to public transit. They thus won’t reduce traffic or pollution. Indeed, a proportion of e-scooter renters use an e-scooter instead of walking or taking public transit. Moreover, for e-scooters to be effective for this “last mile,” Toronto must be inundated with thousands of e-scooters, so one is available whenever a rider wants one. This would exacerbate city clutter and disability barriers.
- It would be appalling for Toronto to use the public, including vulnerable people with disabilities and seniors, as involuntary guinea pigs in a “pilot project” that is, in truth, a human experiment to which those who are endangered have not given consent. In addition, the City of Toronto has no effective way to accurately track the injuries that e-scooters cause.
- The public use of e-scooters in Toronto should remain banned in any form, whether privately owned by the rider or rented, e.g. through a shared e-scooter program. The AODA Alliance opposes any e-scooter rental program, whether run by the e-scooter rental companies directly or by the City of Toronto, e.g. through its Bike Share program.
- E-scooter corporate lobbyists and their allies advance bogus arguments to support their cause. For years, they have inaccurately claimed that new tech eliminates e-scooter dangers. Adding a beeping sound to e-scooters is not sufficient to enable blind pedestrians to scurry to safety in time. E-scooters are not necessary for a robust micromobility strategy, because other safer options are available, such as bikes. Banning e-scooters is a more effective option than trying in vain to regulate how they are ridden.
- We seek the leadership of Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow. We need her and all City Council members to stand up for people with disabilities, seniors, children and others endangered by e-scooters. We need Mayor Chow and City Council to stand up to the e-scooter corporate lobbyists.