City licensing staff want drivers working for ride-hailing companies to undergo mandatory safety training, a recommendation that’s part of a wider package of reforms that could force big changes on how industry giants like Uber and Lyft operate in Toronto.

In a report released Monday, staff recommend drivers be required to take city-accredited courses that would cover topics including safe driving, sharing the road with cyclists and transit vehicles, serving customers with disabilities, and anti-racism sensitivity.

The courses would be mandatory for drivers working for both app-based ride-hailing services and conventional taxi companies, and would go into effect next year.

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While other jurisdictions such as New York City, Chicago and Montreal have mandated training for app-based drivers, the requirement would represent a significant policy reversal for Toronto.

In 2016 council scrapped long-standing training requirements for taxi drivers when it revamped regulations to respond to Uber’s arrival on Toronto’s streets.

The report also recommends other measures aimed at increasing public safety, including increasing the minimum driving experience for drivers from one year to three, rewriting requirements for the use of in-car cameras, mandating that hand-held devices like phones be securely mounted in vehicles, and introducing measures to prevent customers from dooring cyclists.

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The city’s licensing committee will debate the report next Monday. It’s expected to go to full council next month.

Cheryl Hawkes, an advocate who has been pushing for Toronto to impose stiffer regulations on ride-hailing companies, called the training requirement “a very good start.”

Hawkes’s son Nicholas Cameron, 28, died in March 2018 while taking an Uber to Pearson airport. The 23-year-old Uber driver, who at the time of the crash was on his second day driving for the app, later pleaded guilty to a non-criminal careless driving charge.

Hawkes said there was no way to know whether training requirements could have prevented the collision that killed her son, but at least making drivers take safety courses would signal that the city is doing all it can to protect the public.

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“It’s a social responsibility to at least put … people through the hoops of qualifying to be on the road with loved ones in the back seat,” she said.

She said it’s essential that any training the city imposes involve in-car testing, not merely classroom or online components.

“You have to put a bum in the seat and see if they can drive around the pylons,” she said.

Josh McConnell, a spokesperson for Uber, said Monday the company was still going through the report and couldn’t immediately comment on specific recommendations.

“We will have more to say in the coming days,” he said.

A spokesperson for Lyft declined to comment until after the company was able to provide feedback on the report at next week’s committee meeting.

Kristine Hubbard, operations manager for Beck Taxi, said the changes to driver training are “hopeful.”

“It really does depend on what the finer details will be,” she told the Star. “We won’t really know what all of this looks like until it’s been finalized by committee and council.”

She agreed that defensive driving training should happen in-car, not via video.

After the training standards were removed for taxi drivers three years ago, Hubbard said Beck implemented its own mandatory one-week training, offered in partnership with Centennial College, including in-car defensive driving training.

A healthy majority of council members — including Mayor John Tory — approved regulating rather than restricting companies such as Uber in 2016, after much contentious debate over safety and the impact on the taxi industry.

“We cannot end up going out of this chamber without having put some regime in place, and there is no ideal answer that is going to satisfy everybody,” Tory said then.

Tory spokesperson Don Peat said Monday that “throughout this process, the mayor has said he believes safety has to be the No. 1 consideration in this matter.

“He looks forward to seeing the discussion of the staff’s recommendations on how we can enhance safety in vehicles-for-hire at committee.”

According to the report, the use of ride-hailing services has grown significantly in the past three years. As of January, there were an average of 160,400 trips made every day using the apps, an increase of almost 160 per cent compared to September 2016.

As of the start of this year, a total of 90 million ride-hailing trips had been taken in Toronto, and they now make up roughly 3 per cent of all journeys in the city.

There are roughly 90,400 drivers working for ride-hailing services in the city, although some drive occasionally or for limited periods of time. The report put the number of taxi and limousine drivers at about 13,300.