Howard Mosce Responds About Disabled

I give credit to Howard for two things; 1)for responding and 2)the method of responding. The first recognizes that he acheived his primary goal, get his share of media attention and the second for being wise enough to know if he had responded in a face to face with the media somehow he would manage to screw things up. BTW Howard I don't recall calling for "spot checks, enhanced eligibility rules and higher fines for abuse" and I wonder how many of the seniors you smooze in the apartments along Bathurst Street or the homeowners where the Moscoe Bus visited actually called for these things....do you have any empirical data? Maybe your staff could add this info to the bottom of the email form that seems to be the way your staff deals with citizen's concerns.

Feb 15, 2007 04:30 AM
Unfair to the disabled
Editorial, Feb. 14.

Your editorial missed the mark. It advocates that parking for disabled drivers ought to continue to be subsidized. You say that statistics show that "the disabled are more likely to be poor than other residents in the province and are far more likely to need whatever assistance society can provide."

The disabled that you are talking about, for the most part, do not drive cars. They ride public transit and, more particularly, they use the Wheel-Trans system. There are 470,000 disabled parking permits issued by the province of Ontario. Most of these are issued to people who can afford to own cars, pay high rates for insurance and inflated prices for gasoline and, for the most part, who have disabilities like heart conditions and knee replacements.

It is not about the money. At the time disabled parking permits were introduced, parking was controlled by one-hour parking meters. It seemed unfair to require people with disabilities to run back and forth to feed a meter. These have been replaced with two-hour pay-and-display machines, the same machines used by the disabled to pay for parking in city Green P lots. Later this year, I will be introducing a dashboard machine that can be given to people with disabilities, free of charge, to enable them to pay for parking without leaving their cars.

Should the disabled poor be subsidized? Definitely yes, but the $3 million annual subsidy ought not to be directed toward those who can afford to own and drive a car. Cities like Kingston and Vancouver charge for disabled parking, as does Toronto in its commercial and Green P parking lots. A Wheel-Trans ride costs more than $25 for each ride. The disabled pay a single TTC ticket.

In all of my 29 years of dealing with the disabled, they have asked for one thing: "Treat us the same as everyone else." That is why the Toronto Transit Commission has invested millions of dollars in making our bus and subway system accessible to the disabled.

You have called for spot checks, enhanced eligibility rules and higher fines for abuse. None of these will curtail the abuse. The system has to be scrapped and rebooted.

Councillor Howard Moscoe, Chair, City Standards, Toronto