Rethinking sharing can help traffic woes
Toronto, it turns out, likes to share.
A report set to be considered by city hall’s infrastructure and environment committee on Thursday reveals that approximately 32,000 people have signed up as members of the car-sharing service Communauto since it launched in 2018. In the last year alone, the number is up 43 per cent.
On the strength of those numbers, the committee will consider some recommendations to relax the rules for what municipal bureaucrats have dubbed “free-floating car-sharing” in Toronto. It sounds cooler than it is — the cars don’t actually levitate — but it’s still pretty darn cool, because unlike other car-share or car-rental offerings where users need to reserve time, and start and end trips at the same spot, this service allows users to start and end trips at most on-street parking spaces in areas with permit parking.
So you can pick up a car in one neighbourhood and drive to another, without any worry about returning the car to the original spot. There’s no time limit. You just pay for the time you use. It offers a lot of the benefits of car ownership, like the ability to spontaneously drive somewhere, with none of the drawbacks.
The recommendations for the committee include scrapping a limit on the number of cars car-sharing companies can make available — companies like Communauto are currently capped at offering a maximum of 1,000 cars — and allowing cars to be parked in more areas, including areas that do not have permit parking. If the committee approves the changes, city council will also need to sign off when it meets in May.
Let’s hope it does. It’s worth caring about all this sharing for a couple of reasons.
First, several studies have shown that car-share programs offer a lot of benefits, both for individuals and for cities generally.
There’s the money, of course. People who ditch car ownership in favour of car-sharing typically save a big pile of it. A recent report pegged the average annual cost of car ownership in Ontario at a cool $16,644 in 2024. A car-share vehicle can be had for about $15 an hour. You’d need to car-share for more than 1,000 hours over the course of a year to approach the cost of ownership.
But it’s not just about saving people cash. City hall’s transportation department has reviewed multiple studies about the overall effects of car-sharing that conclude that people who have access to car-sharing are more likely to sell their vehicles and tend to drive a lot less, with some estimates that “for every carshare vehicle on the road, six to eight vehicles are eliminated,” the report says.
In other words, even if you’re not a car-share user, you’re likely to benefit from car-sharing, because it results in fewer vehicles in the city with the potential to clog up roads.
The other notable thing? Carsharing is flourishing in Toronto despite a city hall that has never been particularly welcoming to the idea. Imagine how much bigger it could be if city hall actively encouraged it.
Instead, the first company to offer free-floating car-sharing, Car2Go, was chased out of the city in 2018 after residents complained the shared vehicles were taking away on-street parking spaces from car owners.
It left soon after former mayor John Tory and city council approved still-in-force restrictions that say car-share vehicles are not allowed to park in neighbourhoods where there’s a waiting list to get parking permits. The scheme remains complicated and costly to enforce. And it needlessly privileges people who own cars over those who prefer car-sharing.
That just one car-sharing provider has decided to offer service under these rules is a good sign that they’re too onerous.
Still, the recommendations going to committee this week would at least represent some progress. The changes to the parking rules alone, if adopted, will create about 386,000 more parking spaces for Communauto users citywide, the report says.
Currently, the cars can only be parked in neighbourhoods with permit parking, which makes for no-go zones in Scarborough, North York and Etobicoke. The proposed rules will allow parking on most streets that allow free on-street parking and exempt the cars from some rules prescribing time limits on parking, like spots with a onehour maximum.
That’s a sensible change — as is the move to axe the cap on the number of cars — but it would be nice to see city hall go even further by dropping the exclusion zones for neighbourhoods based on parking permit availability.
After all, experience with the program so far suggests there’s little reason to fear more car-sharing. The report says complaints from residents about the program in recent years have been “almost nonexistent.” In fact, the only real complaint people seem to have about car-sharing is that there’s not enough of it.
“The most common complaint is that the service commonly runs out of available cars, particularly on weekends,” the report says. It sounds like people want more sharing. City hall should play nice.