Death of Toronto’s Accessible on Demand Taxis
Ottawa is making it work; why can’t Toronto?
Despite years of warnings and its own cold, hard statistics staring it in the face, the City of Toronto will see its Accessible Taxi on Demand program collapse on March 31st. The last of the vehicles which have been in service for a decade will age out on March 31st, and operators cannot afford to invest in new vehicles while 80,000 Ubers eat their lunch.
This program failure was avoidable, as has been proven by the success of the same service in the City of Ottawa where the wait times for Wheelchair Accessible Vans (WAVs) has been cut in half and the number of available vehicles increased by 20 per cent.
“The Toronto Taxicab License program is the worst public policy in the history of mankind,” Neil Shorey, Assistant General Manager at City Taxi memorably told Taxi News in 2023. He referred to it as former Licensing director Tracey Cook’s “parting gift” as she left for retirement: an ineptly designed program doomed to failure, created in a rush, and never improved upon.
Taxi News crunched the numbers from Toronto’s own website in January 2024 and was easily able to predict this outcome without a course correction; the course was never corrected.
After two age extensions which allowed converted WAVs to stay on the road until they were ten years old (the “bucket of bolts” strategy, chagrined industry members call it), the final rickety, noisy, clunky WAVs have truly aged out, and virtually zero Taxi operators have stepped up to invest $100,000 in new vans. Toronto’s offer of a $25,000 subsidy is a spit in the ocean compared to the revenues operators need to generate to stay afloat, which is impossible in a city with 80,000 Ubers.
Beck Taxi’s Operations Manager Kristine Hubbard deserves a Purple Heart for the job she has done shouting into the wind and the media microphones about the looming deadline.
Today we start confirming w/hospitals, seniors residences, parents of children who depend on the service that our years of warnings have become reality: As of Tuesday, #Toronto will have failed in it's responsibility to comply with the #AODA, wheelchair accessible taxis are gone.
— Kristine Hubbard (@KristineHubbard) March 27, 2026
It’s not rocket science; it’s not brain surgery. Setting up a system with enough Wheelchair Accessible Vehicle capacity and a dispatch system to permit persons with disabilities to call a Taxi company and order a ride which arrives in a reasonable period of time can be done when there is the political will to set up the system.
So the question for Toronto isn’t really whether it is possible to get this done; it can be done.
The more painful question is WHY don’t they? Why won’t Toronto do the work it takes to get it done? What do you think?
