Riders Outside Manhattan Can Now Hail Accessible Taxis, Too

NEW YORK — New York City is expanding a taxi dispatch service for the disabled to allow people who use wheelchairs to order accessible cabs in the boroughs outside Manhattan, officials announced on Wednesday.

The expansion of the service, which had been limited to Manhattan, marked the latest development in the city’s decadeslong efforts to provide people in wheelchairs and motorized scooters with more equitable access to transportation.

“Today’s expansion is an important recognition that we are a city of five boroughs,” Meera Joshi, the commissioner of the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission, said at a news conference in Brooklyn.

Through the dispatch program, riders can arrange to be picked up by a wheelchair accessible taxicab by calling 311, using a mobile app or a website or calling or texting a dispatcher. They would not be charged anything beyond the metered fare for the pickup.

Drivers will be paid a fee to compensate them for the time it takes to drive to a passenger’s location and help them into the cab. A driver who drove 1 to 1-1/2 miles to pick up a disabled passenger in Manhattan, for example, would receive a $20 fee in addition to his share of the metered fare.

For people like Jean Ryan, who lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and uses a motorized scooter, the taxi dispatch program is one of the few options for traveling to Manhattan. The subway station two blocks from her home is not wheelchair accessible and the bus is often too slow, she said. The city’s Access-A-Ride service, a paratransit service for people with disabilities, requires advance booking and can be unreliable, she said.

“I can’t wheel myself to Manhattan,” said Ryan, 73, the vice president of Disabled in Action of Metropolitan New York, an advocacy group.

But even accessible taxis have their limitations, she said. For example, the city’s fleet of Nissan NV200s require that the back seats fold down to fit a wheelchair, meaning that a wheelchair user can only ride with one friend in the front.

“And for getting around on a daily basis it’s too expensive,” she added about cabs.

The Taxi and Limousine Commission spent nearly a decade making improvements to its dispatch program in Manhattan, which arranges 250 trips a day, before rolling it out to all five boroughs.

Graham Hodges, a former New York cabdriver and a historian at Colgate University, lauded the expansion, but questioned the city’s slow pace in addressing the needs of the 90,000 wheelchair users in the city.

“It’s a step in the right direction, but why they took so long to do it is a question,” said Hodges, who wrote a book on the history of New York cabdrivers.

Over the years, the time it takes for a cab to pick up a wheelchair user has decreased. The average wait time for a wheelchair-accessible cab was 34 minutes during a two-year pilot phase in 2008. Today, riders typically wait 13 minutes for a ride, according to Allan J. Fromberg, the commission’s deputy commissioner for public affairs.

In the boroughs outside of Manhattan, the average wait time has been 15-20 minutes during a test phase launched in September, said Alex Elegudin, the accessibility program manager at the commission.

The expansion comes at a time when ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft have overtaken yellow cabs in numbers and popularity. As the companies continue to burgeon, they have also come under fire for a lack of accessibility.

Although Uber voluntarily offers wheelchair-accessible cars through its UberWAV service, critics have said that they account for only a fraction of the company’s fleet. For years, for-hire car services were not required to dispatch accessible vehicles.

But that changed in December, when the commission adopted a rule requiring that ride-hailing companies complete 25 percent of their trips every year using wheelchair-accessible cars by 2022. The rule is meant to increase the circulation of accessible cars for people who need them.

The rule will go into effect on July 1.

The Accessible Dispatch Program was started in 2012, when the Bloomberg administration was embroiled in a bitter feud with advocates for the disabled over the wheelchair accessibility of New York’s taxicabs.

In December 2013, three weeks before Mayor Bill de Blasio was sworn in, the Bloomberg administration settled a class-action suit that accused the city of violating the Americans With Disabilities Act because only a fraction of its taxis were accessible.

The city agreed to adopt regulations to make 50 percent of the city’s more than 13,000 yellow cabs wheelchair-friendly by 2020. The de Blasio administration approved a 30-cent surcharge on taxi rides to help pay for it.

There were 233 accessible yellow cars in 2012, Fromberg said. Today, there are 2,175 wheelchair-accessible yellow cars, he said.