Big number: Up to 8%.

That’s a “conservative estimate” of the proportion of daily traffic in downtown Toronto neighbourhoods found to come from ride-share companies like Uber and Lyft, in a study by city hall’s Big Data Innovation Team released last year.

I’ve been playing a game while walking around downtown Toronto over the last few weeks. I call it “spot the sticker.”

Whenever a driver almost hits me because they were doing something dangerous, I make a point of looking to see whether there’s an Uber or Lyft sticker attached to the car, indicating that they’re probably driving for a ride-sharing service.

I’ve seen a lot of them. Guy who almost clipped me because he didn’t bother to even slow down while making a right turn on a red light? Sticker. Speed demon blasting past streetcar doors while passengers are boarding? Sticker. Road warrior who seemed to not even contemplate that there might be people in the crosswalk before making a fast left turn? You guessed it: a sticker.

I’m paying extra attention to the stickers these days after the city revealed more details about their new training requirement for drivers working for companies like Uber or Lyft. The compulsory training, approved by Toronto council last year partly in response to the death of an Uber passenger, does not have a mandatory in-car component. When it comes into effect in June, the training will be able to be completed entirely with video or online.

Look, I’m no Luddite. I like technology and think it can do a lot of impressive things — like help me learn about architecture or show me a video of a cat playing a piano. But I don’t think it can teach someone how to safely drive a car in downtown Toronto.

Safe driving anywhere requires a lot of training, but downtown driving is next level. Downtown drivers need to be prepared to deal with pedestrians, cyclists and transit vehicles in numbers never seen in the suburbs. My anecdotal sticker-spotting suggests a lot of Uber and Lyft drivers on the road today are not at all prepared for that.

Actual data is harder to come by. Until Toronto’s new regulations took effect at the beginning of this year, there was no specific requirement to record whether a driver involved in an accident was driving for Uber, Lyft or another ride-share company.

In December, Uber did release its own safety report, looking at fatal collisions in the United States. It reported a fatal collision rate of 0.59 fatalities per 100 million miles driven, better than the national rate. But those figures did not account for crashes that resulted in non-death injuries, or crashes that occurred while Uber drivers were driving around while waiting for passengers to require a ride.

These kinds of numbers also can’t ever account for close calls — driver behaviour that makes the streets feel less safe for other road users.

Here’s what we do know for sure about ride-share drivers in Toronto: there are a lot of them, and their numbers are growing. Last June, city hall’s Big Data Innovation Team released a comprehensive report analyzing trip data. It found ride-share growth was up 180 per cent between September 2016 and March 2019. In the downtown area, the study makes a “conservative estimate” that up to eight per cent of daily traffic was ride-share vehicle traffic.

With ride-share vehicles making up an increasing proportion of trips on Toronto streets and having a road safety plan that purports to make the safety of pedestrians and cyclists a priority, you’d think Mayor John Tory and councillors might focus on making sure ride-share drivers are as well trained as possible. But their current bylaw, with no requirement for in-car training, falls way short.

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In an ideal world, perhaps extra training for ride-share drivers wouldn’t be necessary. Instead, training could be improved for all drivers, making it tougher to earn a licence to operate a machine that can easily kill people.

City hall has no jurisdiction over that. But it does have power to mandate actual training for Uber and Lyft drivers. I’ve spotted enough stickers to know it should use it.

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