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Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance Update
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Trying to Get Municipal Candidates to Make the “Municipal Disability Accessibility Pledge” is the Topic in AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky’s Monthly Column in the Toronto Star’s Metroland Publications
September 24, 2026
SUMMARY
In this month’s disability rights column in the Toronto Star’s Metroland publications around Ontario, AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky focuses on the “Municipal Disability Accessibility Pledge” that we are urging municipal candidates to make in the October 26 municipal elections. Below you can read this column as it appeared in the September 23, 2026 edition of the Peterborough Examiner.
How You Can Help
- Send this article to your local municipal candidates. You can use the text below from the Peterborough Examiner or find the version of it, which should be the same, in your nearest Metroland publication.
- Read the AODA Alliance’s Municipal Election Action Kit for other tips on how to raise disability issues in this municipal election.
- Circulate this article via email, social media, or your website (if you have one).
MORE DETAILS
The Peterborough Examiner September 23, 2026
Originally posted at: https://www.thepeterboroughexaminer.com/life/david-lepofsky-e-scooter-hot-topic/article_c647f0b3-e629-59ff-b795-251fd8e4b88b.html
Opinion | Here’s why e-scooters should be a hot topic for your municipal election candidates
Ask candidates to make the municipal disability accessibility pledge that calls for no e-scooters, no scramble intersections and no bike paths on sidewalks, advocate urges.
By David Lepofsky
David Lepofsky is a retired lawyer who chairs the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance and the Toronto District School Boards Special Education Advisory Committee. He is a visiting professor of disability rights at the law schools at Western, Queen’s and the University of Ottawa, and hosts a podcast: Disability Rights and Wrongs – The David Lepodcast.
Ontario municipal and school board elections are on Oct. 26. Ontarians with disabilities need your help.
Municipalities and schools should be more accessible to people with disabilities. The Ontario Human Rights Code, the Charter of Rights and the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act require it.
Ask your community’s candidates for council to make the municipal disability accessibility pledge that calls for no e-scooters, no scramble intersections and no bike paths on sidewalks.
The dangers to people with disabilities multiply when these three issues combine.
For municipal council candidates, the first issue is this: ask candidates to commit not to allow electric scooters in public places, like roads, parks or sidewalks, and to commit to effectively enforcing the law.
E-scooters endanger people with disabilities, seniors and others, racing silently at high speeds on sidewalks, roads and park paths.
A silent menace, e-scooters, appearing out of nowhere, are ridden on sidewalks even if banned from sidewalks.
Uninsured, unlicensed, untrained, unhelmeted joyriders, racing at more than 20 kilometres an hour, endanger the safety of innocent pedestrians, especially people who can’t see them or quickly dodge them.
Left strewn on sidewalks, e-scooters are tripping hazards for blind people and an accessibility nightmare for wheelchair users.
News reports document serious injuries caused by e-scooter use.
Several disability organizations and municipal accessibility advisory committees called on city after city to not allow e-scooters, and to effectively enforce the law.
Some Ontario cities, such as Ottawa, nevertheless allow e-scooters while other cities, like Toronto, don’t allow them, but don’t effectively enforce the ban. Toronto Police commendably undertook a few helpful but short blitzes to enforce the law. We need more of this.
An increasing number of people own their own e-scooters and ride them in public.
Some won’t have a clue that they’re breaking the law. Some parents let their children unlawfully ride them, without even ensuring they wear a helmet.
Nothing stops stores from selling e-scooters, even where it’s illegal to ride them in public. In some cities, people can also rent e-scooters.
It’s not good enough to just ban e-scooters from sidewalks.
In every city that tried it and allowed them on the roads, people kept riding e-scooters on sidewalks. No city has police on every sidewalk to police such weak half-measures.
Second, press municipal candidates to commit not to create scramble intersections, which endanger pedestrians with disabilities.
At a scramble intersection, traffic lights don’t operate like other intersections. During one phase of the traffic cycle, vehicles stop from all directions. Pedestrians cross freely in any direction, including diagonally. The traffic lights cycle to this pedestrian-only phase, then a north-south traffic phase, and then a east-west traffic phase.
This is meant to make things easier for pedestrian and vehicle traffic. Yet for blind and low vision pedestrians, it creates navigation chaos.
During the pedestrian only phase, it eliminates the vital traffic pattern sounds needed to safely navigate across the intersection. It adds further complications for guide dog users. The presence of audible pedestrian signals at these intersections don’t fix this.
For pedestrians with mobility disabilities, curb cuts may not properly accommodate them. Time for crossing the intersection may be too short. For pedestrians with cognitive disabilities, its confusion adds safety and independent navigation difficulties.
Third, press municipal candidates to commit to never build bike paths on sidewalks. Toronto built dangerous new bike paths on the sidewalk, not on the road level.
Don’t forget school board trustee elections!
Ask candidates to pledge to make it a priority to tear down disability barriers impeding students with disabilities in school.