Rationalize Pedicab Pricing and Limits
Bike Taxi's to Union are illegal...
If you’ve been to London or New York lately you’ve noticed the explosion in bike taxi’s. This has happened because of a confluence of factors, including increased number of bike lanes, congestion charges and electrification of bike taxis. They are often a cheap and fast way to move around cities, and they are cheap and easy to operate. So why don’t we see more of them in Toronto?
Well, until recently they were illegal, until 2022 there was no way to operate them legally. However a new pilot program for large quadricycles has allowed for them to be operated within Toronto. So why don’t we see them still almost 2 years later? Well the pilot project has a number of restrictions and costs associated with it that make it less than ideal when compared to other types of taxis (especially electric cars).
First are the restrictions in where and when they can be operated. They can’t be used during rush hour, a 3 hour black-out in the middle of the day makes it hard to have a reasonable daily schedule, and hard to make money if you can’t operate when demand is highest.
There are also four streets you can’t drive on - Front, Queen, King and Gerard at any time. These four streets also present a major bulk of the likely trips that bike taxi’s would serve - the shopping, restaurants and theatres on king street; union station, and meridian hall on front; and the main shopping locations on queen including Eaton Center.
Finally is the cost to license pedicabs.
(License Cost/Renewal Cost)
Pedicab driver: 450$/337$
Pedicab owner: 460$/324$
Taxi driver: 216$
Taxi operator: 703$/308$
Taxi owner: 1249$/694$
Taxi owner EV: 625$/347$
As you can see the costs for an EV Taxi is about the same as a manual bike taxi. This doesn’t seem to make much sense given the restrictions on pedicabs.
Here’s what we should do:
Reduce the initial and yearly renewal for pedicab owners to 100$ for manual powered pedicabs, and 200$ for electric pedicabs
Fix the pedicab driver license cost to 1/2 of the taxi driver cost
Eliminate the rush hour limits on pedicab operation on all roads
Eliminate the operational limits for pedicabs on all roads
For the purposes of the above, the pedicab must seat less than 5 people, and be able to maintain a speed of 20km/h. Larger “bike or pub buses” may have further limitations.
On roads where there are streetcars, the pedicab must give way to streetcars if unable to maintain an appropriate speed by moving to the right lane