City can’t afford to say no to e-scooters

There are a whole lot of reasons to really hate the notion of e-scooters coming to Toronto. In other cities, shared scooters offered by companies like Bird, Lime, Uber, Lyft and others have frustrated the hell out of residents. In Portland, Ore., people started throwing scooters in the river. In Los Angeles, they’ve buried them deep in sand.

That kind of river-chucking, holedigging rage isn’t baseless. There are a bunch of legit concerns about these vehicles. Operated recklessly, they can cause injuries to both riders and nonriders. And the model most scooter companies use, where riders can end trips wherever, has led to sidewalks and streets littered with overturned scooters.

But the scooters are coming, Toronto. Last week, Premier Doug Ford’s government announced a pilot project that opens the door to Toronto City Hall permitting the use of e-scooters.

And despite any misgivings, this city simply can’t say no.

The reason why is simple. Toronto is in no position to block anything that might work as an alternative to the car.

The past few years have served as a terrible non-stop demonstration for why the city needs to reduce the dominance of the automobile. Drivers in cars have been killing and injuring pedestrians at alarming rates. They’ve killed them on sidewalks and in broad daylight, so the answer probably isn’t reflective arm bands. The streets are full of cars, and cars are deadly.

At the same time, traffic is getting worse. And don’t kid yourself, drivers — there’s no solution for that.

At city hall this Thursday, the infrastructure and environment committee will get an update on the $55-million “congestion management plan” approved by council in 2015. Four years in, transportation staff can point to a long list of accomplishments — retiming traffic signals, video monitoring tools, construction co-ordination — but ask yourself, have you noticed traffic getting any better?

Or is the simple truth that efforts like these can’t do much to stem ever-in

creasing traffic? That there are simply too many cars on Toronto’s roads?

Acknowledge that and it starts to get obvious that to improve safety and help people get places faster, the best strategy is to help people get out of their cars altogether — to travel via other means.

I’m a bit of a purist in the sense that I still think the best way to do that is to prioritize old-school modes of transportation: walking, cycling and transit. But e-scooters can be part of the mix.

This looks to be especially true downtown. Earlier this year, the city’s big data innovation team crunched the numbers on trips made with ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft.

They found that ride-hailing vehicles represent up to 11 per cent of all traffic in the downtown area — and use is growing fast. But they also found the average distance for a downtown ride-hailing trip is less than five kilometres.

That’s a lot of short trips that could be made with e-scooters.

This isn’t to say the city should rush forward.

The provincial rules announced by Ford’s government are a decent start, setting a reasonable 24 km/h speed limit and banning scooter use on sidewalks, but Toronto councillors should take the time to study the lessons of other cities, and pass regulations that encourage safety and discourage street clutter. They especially need to hear the concerns of people with disabilities.

But opting out of e-scooters altogether would be shortsighted. After all, this wouldn’t be the first time Toronto has permitted a new mode of transportation to use public roadways.

A hundred years ago, the city turned over its streets to a new kind of vehicle — even permitting users to leave them unattended on the side of the road. But we’re in a new century now, and the consequences of letting cars rule the road are clearer every day.

Toronto must say yes to alternatives, including e-scooters. Please don’t throw them in the lake.

I still think we should prioritize old-school modes of transportation: walking, cycling and transit

Matt Elliott is a Toronto-based freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @GraphicMatt