Nicholas Cameron’s heartbroken siblings are still trying to process the “ridiculous” way he died on March 21 while sitting in the back seat of an Uber car en route to Pearson airport.The driver, Abdihared Bishar Mussa, had steered his 2012 Hyundai Sonata onto the shoulder of the Gardiner Expressway, near Royal York Rd., to remount his fallen cellphone on the dashboard. He was attempting to slowly merge back into traffic when the car was slammed from behind by a BMW, Toronto police said after the crash.Mussa, who recently moved to Toronto from Ottawa, had started driving for Uber just four days earlier to help his family. The BMW driver broke his hand in the crash and Mussa, 23, escaped without injury.Cameron, who was 28, suffered life-threatening injuries and died in hospital the following day.Such tragedies are inevitable since the city abdicated its role in the safety regulation of the vehicle-for-hire industry, say critics of Toronto’s 2016 reforms, which scrapped 17-day mandatory driver training, loosened vehicle standards, and let the newly created Private Transportation Companies (PTC), such as Uber, essentially regulate themselves.“There are too many instances of app-dispatched drivers causing severe problems, in some tragic cases passenger deaths, caused by untrained, unprofessional drivers,” reads a July editorial in Taxinews.Uber drivers must pass background screening and will be denied a PTC licence if they have accumulated nine or more demerit points — at the time of the application or renewal — or if they have been convicted of serious Highway Traffic Act offences, such as racing or stunt driving, or failing to remain at the scene of an accident, in the preceding five years.Cameron’s family believes the loosened rules fall short of protecting the travelling public.In June, Cameron’s mother Cheryl Hawkes appeared before the city’s municipal licensing and standards committee and urged c ...
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