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MTA puts limits on ‘life-changing’ taxi service for disabled riders
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Stephen Nessen
Published Sep 27, 2023
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Stephen Nessen
By
Stephen Nessen
Published Sep 27, 2023
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Navigating New York City with a disability has never been easy.
But in 2017, commutes became simpler for disabled New Yorkers like Christy Cruz-Cullins, 41, who uses a motorized wheelchair with pink trim.
The MTA that year launched a pilot program that allowed Cruz-Cullins and 1,200 other people with disabilities to order wheelchair-accessible taxis anywhere across the five boroughs for $2.75, the same cost as a subway ride at the time. Those in the program could order an unlimited number of taxi rides on demand and around the clock — a departure from the MTA’s blue and white Access-A-Ride vans, which must be booked a day in advance.
Suddenly, Cruz-Cullins could take her daughter Trinity to school in Harlem from their Kips Bay apartment without waking up early to catch a bus or head to a subway station with an elevator that’s often out of service. She could easily get to work or extracurricular activities, like a New York Liberty game or her doctor appointments, whenever she wanted and as often as she liked.
But all that changed last month.
In late July, Cruz-Cullins received an email from the MTA stating the program would be essentially ending. In early August, it was replaced with a new, limited service.
Cruz-Cullins can still hail a wheelchair-accessible taxi with her phone, but now she can only take 25 one-way trips each month. And under the changes, she now pays a base of $4 per ride and the MTA covers fares totaling up to $40. After that, she has to cover the difference out of her own pocket.
“Angry. Very angry,” is how Cruz-Cullins said she felt when she got the news. “It was just like, how could you make these changes? I don't think they realize that people with physical disabilities are active in the community, and we have lives, we have families, we work every day,” she said.
Christy Cruz-Cullins
Stephen Nessen
But the MTA said the old unlimited program cost too much.
Chris Pangilinan, the MTA’s vice president of paratransit, told Gothamist that some people would rack up $600 worth of rides through the program in a single day. He said 6% of the people enrolled in the program ate up half its budget, and that those people were “traveling salespeople or visiting people all over the city” who “would violate our basic terms of service.”
Pangilinan, who was hired last year, said the MTA was spending about $16 million a year on the unlimited rides.
“Unfortunately, when it was launched, there was really no plan for data collection, no plan for expansion, and no budget set for this, for this pilot,” Pangilinan said at a board meeting in June. “So the lack of structure has gotten us to where we are today.”
Still, the average cost per ride given through the old pilot program was $47, according to MTA officials. Pangilinan said the program aimed to move riders away from the agency’s blue and white Access-A Ride vans, which cost the agency an average of $115 per rider. Those vans have long been a source of complaints for riders, who say the vans are often late in picking them up and take circuitous routes before dropping them off.
The vans still provide about 30% of the MTA’s Access-A-Ride trips. The rest are given through either the on-demand program used by Cruz-Cullins or a third-party broker service.
The $16 million the MTA spent each year for the on-demand program was a drop in the bucket compared to the agency’s overall paratransit budget, which allocates more than $500 million a year on services like Access-A-Ride that move more than 176,000 New Yorkers with limited mobility.
Pangilinan insisted the MTA’s paratransit program was never meant to turn into a for-hire vehicle service.
“Transit is not intended to be a taxi service, but rather it's supposed to be a next day shared ride service comparable to public transportation,” Pangilinan told Gothamist.
Disability advocates point out subway and bus riders are not required to book their trips a day in advance, which is the case for any Access-A-Ride user who isn’t enrolled in the on-demand service. And when wheelchair users do use the subway, their options are limited because fewer than a third of the city’s 472 subway stations are accessible.
“The challenge for the MTA is to offer Access-A-Ride service for disabled New Yorkers that actually gets them when and where they want to get there — which the first phase of the on-demand pilot did,” Joe Rappaport, executive director of the Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled, wrote in an email. “That's why people in the first phase of the e-hail program called it 'life-changing.' It's why a real on-demand service is the best route to decent Access-A-Ride service."
The MTA previously planned to end the unlimited program in 2020, citing high costs. But then the pandemic hit, ridership dropped and officials allowed it to continue.
MTA officials also said they needed to end the unlimited ride option in order to expand the service to more people. Pangilinan said about 700 of the pilot program’s original 1,200 users remain enrolled — and the agency plans to expand the service to 3,600 disabled commuters.
Christy Cruz-Cullins and her daughter Trinity.
Stephen Nessen
This month, the MTA is sending letters inviting more people to enroll in the service. Officials said it’s too early to see how much the new setup will cost the agency — or what impact it will have on those who join.
But for Cruz-Cullins, the change is already affecting her daily life. As she nears the end of her first full month under the new program, she still has a few of her 25 allocated trips left.
But she complained the service’s operators — which include Uber — have been raising prices during bad weather. That makes many of her trips more expensive than the $40 allocated by the MTA, so she often takes her wheelchair in the rain instead of paying to cover the difference.
“My concern now is how am I going to get to my primary care physician, whose office is in Coney Island, Brooklyn?” she said.
Tagged
new york city
transportation
Stephen Nessen
Stephen Nessen covers transportation. Since 2008 he has reported on everything from Occupy Wall Street, the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site, Hurricane Sandy, to Trump’s campaign for president. His transportation reporting has taken him everywhere from the MTA’s secret Rail Control Center to the gleaming subways of Seoul. Got a tip? Email [email protected].
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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