Bike licensing in Toronto officially flatted, reports

A Toronto city councillor’s goal of re-introducing bike licensing hit the skids this week, after the city’s Public Works and Infrastructure Committee threw a wrench into the plan on Sept. 27.

Local councillor Stephen Holyday, representing Etobicoke’s Ward 3 in Toronto’s west end, was its lone advocate.

During the past few decades, the idea of bike licensing—which would effectively resurrect a regime that existed from 1935 to 1957— has come up several times, notably in 1984, 1992 and 1996. Each time, the Toronto Star reports, the idea was rejected by councillors, and 2016’s take on the debate was no different. Holyday, the author of the bike licensing motion first tabled in July—and who was one of only two councillors to vote against Toronto’s 10-year bike network plan—was the only local lawmaker in favour of the idea going into the Sept. 27 meeting. Four other councillors were in opposition.

The idea, the Ward 3 councillor said, was to use such a system to promote health, generate revenue for bike infrastructure, and to gather data on the city’s overall ridership. But according to Jared Kolb of Cycle Toronto, a local advocacy group, the plan would have had the effect of discouraging riders from taking to the streets altogether—or at the very least, fail to encourage compliance with the rules of the road.

Given the plummeting popularity of bike licensing in places like Regina, and the fact that such regimes have been found to generate insufficient revenue, it’s also simply unnecessary, Kolb told the Star.

“We don’t see a financial reason to do this,” he told reporters, “and we don’t see a social policy reason to do it either.”