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Thanks to UberAccess the opportunities for disabled customers have increased and they have a greater range of options when it comes to travelling from A to B. Perhaps you’ve had to sit around for an hour or two?
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“It was like an Elvis sighting.As an Uber driver there are times when you are inundated with journeys to make and people to pick up, but other days can be much slower. “Finding one was like a freaky thing,” said Jean Ryan, the president of Disabled In Action, which is also part of the lawsuit.
“The lawsuit, though it has not worked perfectly, did make a huge difference,” he said.Īt the time of the settlement, merely 231 of the city’s more than 13,000 taxicabs were wheelchair accessible, so the number has increased more than tenfold. Rappaport, of the Taxis For All Campaign, credited the lawsuit for “real progress” in improving accessibility from 2013.
“When I was living in The Bronx, I couldn’t get an accessible green taxi anywhere,” Jones said. Green taxis that are licensed to pick up street hails in the boroughs and north of East 96th Street and West 110th streets in Manhattan are also struggling to meet their state legislature mandate of being 20% accessible.Īccording to TLC data, as of Tuesday, only 69 of 1,418 green taxis are equipped for wheelchairs - in spite of more than $17 million going into a separate fund between 2015 and May of last year for accessibility improvements to those vehicles. “The COVID-19 pandemic was deeply disruptive to an already struggling taxi industry, but with the city moving towards recovery, we are moving this important work forward and aiming to meet those goals.” “We are working actively to meet our accessibility goals as quickly as possible,” the agency wrote in an unsigned email.
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In addition, the commission uses the money for the Citywide Accessible Dispatch program, which provides on-demand, door-to-door accessible yellow and green taxi trips that will go as far as Westchester County, Nassau County or the three regional airports.Īn amendment to the 2013 settlement also includes enhanced training for cabbies on how to operate the equipment that allows wheelchairs and scooters to enter and exit the vehicles.
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The TLC said the fund also gives owners $14,000 when they put a new wheelchair accessible vehicle on the road, plus up to $4,000 annually for maintenance.
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He added, “It’s very sad.” ‘A Shrinking Number’Īccording to a 2021 TLC report to the City Council, the city’s Taxi Improvement Fund has collected more than $170 million in 30-cent surcharges since 2015 to provide owners and drivers of yellow taxicabs with incentives to make their vehicles wheelchair accessible. “Every time the city has an obligation to the disability community, something always goes wrong,” said Dustin Jones, 33, a Chelsea wheelchair user who describes taxis as his “basic mode of transportation.” The commission does not say how many medallions are presently in storage, but those that are still in service face a Janudeadline. Members and sponsors make THE CITY possible. Meanwhile, the deadline to make half of all medallion taxis, including those in storage, accessible has been pushed back to June 30, 2023, according to court documents filed last year in the Taxis For All Campaign’s case against the TLC.
“So it’s just going to be a lower overall number.”Īn analysis by THE CITY of Taxi and Limousine Commission data shows that only 2,719 of the 7,309 yellow taxicabs that were in service as of Tuesday - or 37% - were wheelchair accessible. “We’ve been seeing the number of vehicles pulled out of active fleets going up and the number of active medallions going down,” said Stuart Seaborn, managing director of litigation for Disability Rights Advocates, a nonprofit legal center which represents the plaintiffs. The landmark 2013 deal, which called for 50% of the 13,587 medallion cabs to be accessible two years ago, was celebrated at the time as the “first of its kind in the country.”īut with the industry in a long-running state of upheaval due, in part, to the rise of the app-based services Uber and Lyft - whose number of vehicles went unchecked for years - there are fewer taxis on the road, with the stock of vehicles equipped for wheelchairs also dwindling. The city has yet to meet its mandate to make half of all yellow taxicabs accessible to people in wheelchairs and scooters - after blowing a 2020 deadline set nearly a decade ago by the settlement of a federal class-action lawsuit.
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