The City of Toronto wants to keep its ban on e-scooters. Meanwhile, Ottawa is embracing them

Thestar.com
May 5, 2021

In past months, several Canadian cities have rolled out e-scooter pilot projects that let residents rent and ride the electric vehicles. Toronto, however, has been reluctant to join their ranks, and city staff recently recommended against lifting the city’s ban on e-scooters ahead of a council vote this week.

Meanwhile, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton and Windsor have gone ahead with e-scooter experiments, and local lawmakers said they have seen success and plan to expand their pilot projects in the future.

Ottawa transportation committee chair Coun. Tim Tierney championed the e-scooter pilot in his city, which ran between July and October last year. Once the provincial stay-at-home order is lifted, he said a new pilot will begin with more than twice as many e-scooters made available to residents this time around.

Tierney said Ottawa carefully considered the issue before green-lighting the pilot, adding how he’s witnessed first-hand how “out of control” the devices can get when used and stowed improperly.

“When we went into this pilot, we wanted to make sure we had a lot of real restrictions,” Tierney said. He said the three e-scooter vendors picked to supply the city are forced to “fight it out, like ‘The Hunger Games’ -- if they don’t fulfil their duty to pick up misplaced scooters in a very short window, they could lose their opportunity to be part of the next pilot.”

Tierney said this approach “worked out really well.” Out of more than 200,000 e-scooter rides taken in Ottawa during the pilot, only about 150 complaints of improper parking were reported. Tierney said the e-scooter companies responded to alerts on social media of e-scooters left about and cleared them “within minutes.”

Ottawa also instituted a two-strike system that means any rider who leaves an e-scooter outside of a designated drop-off zone twice gets banned from using the ride-sharing system, Tierney said. Each e-scooter is equipped with a GPS, so they can be easily located and rider information, including their credit card, is stored, so blame and sometimes fines can quickly follow.

Getting caught riding an e-scooter on the sidewalk costs $180 in Ottawa.

The e-scooters in Ottawa were also caged to certain designated areas within the city. If a rider tried to drive them off the path, the e-scooters would automatically shut off.

Tierney said he considers the pilot “very successful” and believes the near-unanimous vote by city council for its return is owed to the environmental benefit it provided the city.

“There are a lot of government workers in downtown Ottawa, and sometimes they’ll say, ‘I want to go get a salad from that restaurant six blocks up’ and jump in their car to go get it,” he said. “Well, now we’ve given them another, environmentally friendly, alternative.”

Disability advocates and some city staff say being struck by an e-scooter that can move quietly and have top speeds of more than 40 km/h -- although provincial guidelines say they should top out at 24 km/h -- could have devastating consequences, particularly for seniors and disabled people.

To combat this, Ottawa e-scooters automatically reduce in speed in certain busy areas, such as the downtown ByWard Market, from a maximum allowable programmed speed of 21 km/h to eight km/h.

Advocates also worry improperly parked e-scooters could be hazardous for blind people, people with mobility issues or those unable to move the vehicles, which weigh up to 33 lbs.

Because of these and other concerns over liability if someone is injured or injures another while riding an e-scooter, the vehicles are currently illegal in Toronto, pending a final decision by city council this week -- although walking around downtown may lead you to conclude otherwise.

Stewart Lyons, CEO of the Canadian division of e-scooter company Bird, said worries over liability are “nonsensical” and “unique to Toronto.” (John Bitove, brother of Toronto Star publisher Jordan Bitove, is the chairman of Bird Canada.)

“Bike-sharing in Toronto uses the same insurance we have in every market in Canada,” said Lyon. “How come it can operate without third-party insurance in Toronto but we would have to have it?”

In a report last month, city transportation staff recommended that Toronto not opt-in to an e-scooter pilot, “as there are not adequate protections for e-scooter riders and non-riders.”

City staff cited problems related to accessibility, safety and insurance posed by e-scooters and said solutions to them proposed by the e-scooter industry “are not satisfactory.”

“The staff report focuses very much on still outstanding safety and accessibility issues,” said Lawvin Hadisi, spokesperson for Mayor John Tory. “Those very same legitimate concerns were also raised by many groups and individual members of the public.”

Hadisi said Tory looks forward to the debate over the report at council this week, however, he takes the concerns in the report seriously and believes the recommendation to not attempt a pilot “is the appropriate course to take in light of those important outstanding concerns.”

Lyons said e-scooters provide “a myriad of benefits” to cities and the people in them.

“E-scooters are one of the many arrows in the quiver cities can use to reduce greenhouse emissions,” said Lyons. “The statistics from the 150 cities around the world that allow e-scooters all come back the same: between 30 to 40 per cent of the time, they replace a car trip.”

Tierney said on top of that, another benefit he and other Ottawaans get from having e-scooters around is the “cool factor.”

“People usually think Ottawa is a sleepy city, but we’ve got scooters!” he said. “I guess Toronto has turned into Sleepy Hollow now.”