Council sides with Chicken Little brigade

One way of looking at it is that Car2Go is just the latest victim of Toronto city council’s encouragement.

On Thursday, the “free-floating” car-sharing company that allows rentals by the minute that are effectively similar to hailing a cab that you drive yourself (pick one up from wherever you are, park it and end your rental at your destination), announced that as of May 31it would be closing up shop in Toronto.

The company blamed restrictions and fees recently passed by Toronto city council that make its business model unworkable.

That was not the stated goal of the city council actions they are referring to. On the face of it, the goal of the “free-floating car share pilot” was the opposite. As Mayor John Tory said in a statement in response to the company’s announcement, “This pilot is intended to expand the car sharing options available to Torontonians, making it easier for them to park and car share near where they live.”

I have written recently — about my fears of what may soon happen to proposals to allow laneway housing in Toronto — that our city council has a habit of loving things to death. They see something they want to encourage and then, in trying to allow it, put so many restrictions and burdens on anyone actually trying to do it that they cause it to disappear.

Those of us with long memories will recall the ballyhooed Toronto a la Cart food program during the ’00s, which set out to allow all kinds of foods — not just hotdogs! — to be sold on city streets. The result of that fiasco was a limited run for a very few hand-picked operators using city-dictated equipment to produce city-micromanaged menus, and ultimately the bankrupting of just about every entrepreneur who participated.

The more recent famous example was regulations to encourage food trucks in Toronto, in such as way as to ensure that these food vendors never provide any competition whatsoever to any existing bricks-and-mortar restaurant. Which means you don’t see too many food trucks around.

One well-intentioned restriction after another is added to the “encouragement” until it becomes such a burdensome or expensive hassle that no one would ever do it. It may have seemed that technology might dazzle the city out of this habit. Dealing recently with similar tech-based service providers, Toronto city council recently created regulations to satisfy Uber and Airbnb, even though doing so displeased the conventional competitors and labour critics of those companies. But in the case of Car2Go, the sticking point is about parking. Which is never going to be easy to get unstuck about in Toronto.

Car2Go’s “free-floating” model of car sharing pretty much depends on people being able to park them in any legal parking space. People take them one way and then park them, and they become available for anyone else to pick up and use from that spot.

However, there’s a legitimate concern in some permit-only residential areas that street parking is already in short supply. Homeowners in areas with no garages or parking spots on their property complain that they will not be able to park in front of their houses because these rental jobs are taking all the spots.

Others argue in favour of the staff report claim that services like this reduce vehicle ownership rates — making it viable for people to not have a family car. A bunch of homeowners on the same street without cars might make use of one or two shared cars that only take up a couple of spots. Which might reduce demand for the street parking spots overall.

In any event, city council sided — as it virtually always has — with the personal parking Chicken Little brigade. They sought to ban car-share services from parking in areas where permit parking is more than 95 per cent subscribed. They further allowed that community councils could ban car-share permits from any other street on an ad hoc basis. And the rate for car share permits for services like Car2Go to be allowed to park in the other areas was set at $1,500 per vehicle.

Car2Go claims in its announcement that about half of its current customer trips start or end in one of the areas that would now be prohibited. But further, it seems to me, a model like this depends on easily understood rules about where you can or can’t park. Trying to figure out, as a customer, on the fly, whether the street you’re on exceeds some permit-subscription threshold (which aren’t posted on street signs or anything at the moment) doesn’t make it easy. It makes it hard.

Of course, another way of looking at this is that this isn’t a model that can or should work in Toronto (even though it has been accepted and allowed in other cities). Car2Go has, for a few years, operated in violation of existing laws against parking overnight on residential streets, accumulating millions in fines as part of the cost of doing business. Like other “disruptive” companies before them (notably Uber), they set up an illegal business model and demanded the city change the law to suit their practices. Now that it hasn’t done so to their satisfaction, they’re leaving.

“Throughout this process Car2Go has chosen confrontation over collaboration with City Council,” Tory said in his statement. “While their decision to suspend operations in Toronto is unfortunate, it is their decision alone to walk away from a clear path towards regulations that would allow them to operate in our city in a reasonable, compatible way. I’m confident that other car sharing companies willing to work with us and to operate in this manner will succeed in Toronto.”

I’m biased in as much as this was the only car-sharing pricing and rental model that has ever been useful to me — and it’s one I have taken advantage of on many occasions. I think it’s a shame that a company already invested enough in the city to have 80,000 customers here and a city council whose stated goal was to make it easier for them to do business couldn’t work something out. Even for a pilot period, where if the idea is to test something, you might have fewer restrictions at first so you can see what problems actually emerge.

But then we’re talking about parking. Expecting something reasonable when it comes to parking policy, in this city, is almost always too tall an order.