Ragging the puck while 85,000 vehicles idle
Attempt to defy the Law of Supply and Demand harms everyone
When time and words are wasted intentionally in politics, it’s known as “ragging the puck.” Politicians and officials just talk out the clock, introduce red-herring topics to take listeners off track, and generally squander valuable meeting time.
WHY, I wondered on March 19th, is Committee YET AGAIN, addressing numerous items that will have nothing to do with how many Wheelchair Accessible Vans in which Toronto Taxi operators choose to invest (if any at all)? How can they conspicuously, studiously ignore the single most high-priority issue at hand: the need to put a cap on the number of Vehicles for Hire allowed to cruise Toronto’s streets?
Watch the videos posted above and below to hear Spinal Cord Injury advocate Peter Athanasopoulos’ deputation and the conversation between him and Mayor Chow. Neither ever mentions the fact that it was open entry into the VFH market and allowing Uber to run an unlimited number of vehicles which destroyed Taxi operators’ ability to generate enough revenues to keep a car on the road, never mind a converted Wheelchair Accessible Taxi.
Chow and Athanasopoulos chat about:
-Extending the age of Wheelchair Accessible Vehicles (WAVs) to 10 years
-how WAVs are registered with the City
-Centralized dispatch for Accessible Taxis
-the proposed $50,000 grant
-the fact that Tesla is not eligible for the $50,000 grant, because they are American and Toronto now hates Tesla
-the fact that Toronto does not have a plan for providing Accessible services
-whether the “on-demand” services the disability community wants can be American or need to be Canadian
-what combination of Taxi/Uber and Canadian/American vehicles the disability community considers appropriate
This last point is very much like debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Toronto staffer Josh Cho said out loud in public at last June’s VFH consultations that he had determined that “Uber and Lyft have, between them, maybe one Accessible vehicle.”
Toronto has gone from 5,500 licensed Taxis to 85,000 Vehicles for Hire. There are not enough revenues available to provide 85,000 drivers a living wage. Also, these drivers can no longer afford to borrow $100,000 to purchase a new van and have it converted to a Wheelchair Accessible Van.
If Toronto does not put a cap on the number of VFH – Taxi and rideshare – there will be no Wheelchair Accessible Vans for the on-demand service for which Athanasopoulos has hoped over the last 20 years (and which actually existed for about a minute, in 2015). Since Toronto allowed open entry to the VFH market in 2016, the WAV operators have been financially devastated and most have no plans to put new vehicles on the road when their current WAVs age out.
Most of the Wheelchair Accessible Vans available for on-demand service in Toronto are going to age out of the system on March 31, 2025, and then there will be NO Accessible Taxis for persons with disabilities to call up, at industry standard times or even industry sub-standard times.
It’s surprising that on March 19th, no one wanted to discuss the connection between open-entry for 85,000 Vehicles for Hire and the absence of Accessible on-demand vans. Until that is fixed, nothing can be fixed.
