Toronto bike licensing idea scuttled - again
The city’s public works and infrastructure committee voted 4 to 1 on Tuesday to park a proposed study of bicycle licensing indefinitely, effectively killing the proposal.

thestar.com
By Ben Spurr
Sept. 27, 2016

The wheels have come off a plan to study licensing Toronto’s bicycles.

The public works and infrastructure committee voted 4 to 1 on Tuesday to defer the issue indefinitely, effectively killing off the proposal.

Councillor Stephen Holyday, who authored the bike licensing motion and was the lone vote in favour, said he was surprised the decision was so one-sided. Public opinion polls suggest there is sizable support for compelling cyclists to get a licence for their rides.

Holyday (Ward 3, Etobicoke Centre) said in an interview that he had never been dead-set on implementing licensing, but he wanted a report on the issue so that council could make an informed decision.

“But we won’t ever hear about what that could be because the report’s been muzzled,” he said.

Holyday was one of only two councillors who voted against the city’s new 10-year cycling-network plan in June, and also opposed a pilot project of separated bike lanes on Bloor St.

But he rejected the idea that his licensing proposal was “an attack on cyclists.” He told the committee on Tuesday that “the last thing I’d want to do is deter people from cycling in this city.”

His motion said the goal of any licensing system, which would have only applied to adult riders, would have been to gather ridership data, promote health, encourage use of the city’s smartphone cycling append, and generate revenue to pay for cycling infrastructure.

This wasn’t the first debate at city hall over bicycle licensing. Toronto instituted a bicycle-licensing regime in 1935 but eliminated it in 1957. Since then it has studied the idea at least three times - in 1984, 1992, and 1996 - and rejected it each time.

Cycle Toronto executive director Jared Kolb said scrapping the proposal yet again “is the right move.”

He said that licensing cyclists or their vehicles wouldn’t encourage compliance with the rules of the road, because police are already empowered to ticket riders. And other jurisdictions have discovered licensing isn’t a viable revenue source because the administrative costs are higher than any money that could be raised. Kolb said that jurisdictions like Regina and Los Angeles that have tried to implement licensing systems are repealing them.

“We don’t see a financial reason to do this, and we don’t see a social policy reason to do it either,” Kolb said.

Holyday first put forward the licensing motion in July, but it failed to get the support of two-thirds of councillors that it needed to get on that month’s council agenda.