It’s beyond comprehension

Toronto’s population up 7 per cent; Vehicles for Hire up 1,462 per cent

California is on fire while there is no water in the fire hydrants; Justin Trudeau “resigned” then flew to the United States to speak as Canada’s Prime Minister (“I thought Trudeau resigned?” my brother asked in confusion. “Why is he here?”)

Toronto staff tell Taxi News it needs one Vehicle for Hire for every 33 residents, a day after Mayor Chow announces the hiring of 75 new Traffic Agents to prevent gridlock at downtown intersections.

It’s beyond comprehension.

Up until last week when the California wildfires started and the fire hydrants ran dry, the most burning question on my mind was why Carlton Grant made such an inaccurate statement on Vehicle for Hire (VFH) numbers at the December Executive Committee meeting. Grant is the Executive Director of Toronto’s Licensing and Standards Division.

Defending his proposal to “cap” rideshare drivers at 80,429 because that’s how many there were on December 1^st, 2024, Grant seemed to acknowledge that simply selecting a date on the calendar was an arbitrary way to decide how many VFHs Toronto needs. (“A ‘cap’ of 80,429 vehicles?” one industry member asked. “Why not be honest and ‘cap’ it at one million cars? That should make everybody happy!”)

However, in answering Councillor Jennifer McKelvie’s question on how staff came up with the number, Grant claimed “We can’t just go back to 50,000, or 40,000 or 20,000. There is no data that supports that.”  

This is not true. Toronto taxpayers paid for a virtual encyclopedia of data that supports going “back to 50,000, or 40,000, or 20,000.” It’s just that staff chose not use any of that data.

In 2013, Toronto paid consulting firm Taxi Research Partners (now Transportation Research Partners) to conduct a year’s worth of research into how many Vehicles for Hire Toronto had, and how many it needed. The 89-page report found Toronto needed 5,500 VFH, roughly one per every 500 residents. (Hailo and Uber are listed as contributors to those consultations.)

Since 2013, Toronto’s population has increased by 7 per cent. The number of VFH cruising Toronto’s streets has increased by 1,462 per cent.

Perhaps this helps explain why, on January 9^th, Mayor Olivia Chow needed to announce new spending of $3 million to hire an additional 75 Traffic Agents to direct gridlocked traffic, bringing the total number Agents up to 100. I’m sure extensive study will find that there is a direct correlation between the percentage increase of Vehicles for Hire and the absolute number of Traffic Agents needed to prevent gridlock, but that’s next year’s research project.

Ever the optimist, I actually wondered if Mayor Chow and Council, and current L&S staff were aware the copious amount of exhaustive research conducted by a highly credible independent agency a decade ago, when Toronto only had 196,000 fewer people. No matter how the marketing, lobbying and pricing strategies of various Vehicle for Hire service providers have changed over the past decade, Toronto’s population has only grown 7 per cent and not very many new roads or streets have been added to the downtown core, if any at all.

Possibly, Carlton Grant sincerely believes that the justification for increasing the number of Vehicles for Hire by 1,462 per cent is that Uber and Lyft entered the Toronto market in around 2014 and somehow, that changed everything including physical reality and the time/space continuum.

Uber and Lyft entering the market did indeed flood the roads with drivers and provide residents with a cheaper VFH option.

What Uber and Lyft entering the market did NOT do was add any more roads to downtown Toronto. The the pool of residents willing to pay for personalized rides increased not because the population grew substantially, but because the new price point allows rideshare to cannibalize the TTC which now loses millions of dollars per year in fares. The TTC is losing these revenues to the very corporations whose drivers are clogging the streets and making Traffic Agents necessary. (A recent study estimates the cost of this gridlock at $50 billion annually.)

It’s beyond comprehension.

When Uber and Lyft were setting up shop in Toronto in 2014, the City’s highest transportation priority was the Toronto Transit Commission. Taxis had long been intentionally categorized as a more expensive, less widely-promoted alternative reserved for exceptional circumstances. That’s why their numbers were strictly limited and prices kept comparatively high by government regulation.

In 2014, Toronto didn’t want its 5,500 Taxis to be so cheap and easy to use that they were competition for the TTC.

Allowing rideshare open access to Toronto streets has already killed the City’s nascent “Accessible Taxi on Demand” program, which is pathetic to note in the year Ontario observes the 20^th anniversary of the Access for Ontarians with Disabilities Act.

It seems Toronto will not be happy until rideshare also annihilates its reputation as a workable city and its transit system too.

Now, Toronto seems to want its 80,429 Vehicles for Hire to be cheap and instantly available; city officials are willing to tie traffic up in knots, encouraging $5.00 trips in an Uber rather than on a streetcar. One of the unintended consequences of this set-up is that both the Uber and the streetcar are sitting in gridlock, waiting for a Traffic Agent to clear the boxed-in intersection.

It’s beyond comprehension.

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