Plans for media briefing on VFH report December 3
Toronto expects to post the Vehicle for Hire Review report on the morning of Tuesday, December 3rd.
Some kind of briefing session to accompany the report is currently in the planning stages, with details for the briefing to be made available on Monday, December 2nd.
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Taxi industry suggestions to VFH consultations
In its July 19th submission to the consultation, several of Toronto’s largest Taxi brokerages put forward the following list of recommendations:
1. Healthy competition under fair conditions should be an explicit regulatory goal.
2. Private Transportation Companies (PTCs) as well as Taxis should be subject to City-established limits on licensed Vehicle for Hire (VFH) drivers to ensure a viable, diverse industry. Well-designed license limits will also help ensure inactive plates can be brought back into service.
3. Extrapolating from past practice, no more than 16,650 full-time equivalent licensed VFH (Taxi and PTC drivers) should be needed to meet Toronto’s ground transportation needs once all available Taxi licenses are in active use.
4. Improving Accessible on-demand Taxi service must be a key priority. The industry supports staff’s proposals to create a city-run centralized dispatch service, and institute operational as well as vehicle subsidies, though actual subsidy levels must reflect actual costs. Ensuring overall industry viability is also necessary to retain and recruit accessible on-demand drivers.
6. Requirements for vehicle insurance should be comparable between Taxis and PTCs; for PTCs, the City should directly oversee proof of commercial insurance and proof that personal insurers have been notified of ride-hailing activities.
7. To prevent price- and pay- gouging, the City must institute minimum time and distance fares for PTCs as well as Taxis and require providers to fully disclose information about rates and fees to both drivers and passengers.
8. PTC vehicles must be distinctly and clearly identified while operating commercially to protect customers and other road users and facilitate enforcement efforts.
9. The City should resume in-car defensive driving instruction and in-person testing to improve the rigour of current driver training and combat cheating. Current training providers must be carefully reviewed.
10. Universal smart meters should be implemented to facilitate data collection from all industry participants and provide operational data directly to the City.
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Rideshare Drivers recommendations:
Rideshare Drivers Association of Ontario would like to see the following issues addressed in any new Vehicle for Hire regulations:
- City staff should be responsible for issuing a single, transportable license to ride share drivers, which would allow them to drive for any private transportation company or Taxi company. Authority for granting or cancelling licenses should not be reside with rideshare corporations like Uber or Lyft.
- A published rate card: fees paid by time and distance should be set and displayed where both drivers and passengers can review them. Algorithmic calculations to minimize driver pay and maximize customer charges, should be disallowed.
- There should be a cap on the number of Vehicles for Hire licensed at any given time, with 40,000 being suggested as a manageable number of rideshare and Taxis combined.
