THE TAXIS FOR ALL CAMPAIGN
In this image: A 1908 photo of an automobile outing for disabled children.
I tend to get two reactions when I talk with nondisabled friends about the New York City Disability Rights Movement. First, they wonder why universal access was ever controversial, and second, they wonder why it’s taking so long to finish the job.
The first reaction is heartening if not altogether surprising (they are, after all, MY friends). As for the second reaction—why is it taking so long—the fight for accessible taxis is one of the best illustrations.
A completely accessible and affordable taxi system would mean The Revolution for people with mobility impairments. True freedom of travel would tie together the other accomplishments of the City’s Disability Rights Movement and usher in an environment not unlike, say, Barcelona, where 100% accessible transit means that you routinely see people with mobility impairments everywhere, all the time, and nobody seems to think about it very much.
Building out transportation for New Yorkers with disabilities is an old topic. “Driving funds,” private carrier vehicles, even a separate taxi system, were being proposed and implemented more than a hundred years ago. But they were very limited in scale and tended to be restricted to trips for medical care and outings for children. Not until the modern Disability Rights Movement did the campaign for true freedom of movement fully emerge.
According to Marvin Wasserman, the fight over taxis began around 1980: “I was on my first date with Sandra [Schnur]. We went to the Village, and we saw that the only other wheelchairs users were activists, people were still hidden away. Wheelchair users had to travel in the street because there were no curb cuts. A separate paratransit system [with vans bearing the offensive phrase “invalid coach”] was free for people on Medicaid, but only for work and medical. For social it was at least $60--a lot of money, especially for a population that’s generally pretty low income. Sandra said her dream was accessible cabs, freedom of travel like anyone else. A mutual friend, the inventor Vladi Tica, had designed an accessible cab but he couldn’t secure funding to develop it.
“Well, Sandra and I got married. After she passed away in 1984, I promised myself I’d try to make her dream a reality.”
Disabled In Action (DIA) had already established a committee to lobby the City Council on accessible cabs; members included Bobby Levine and Freida Zames. Over the next several years the City’s disability activists won major victories: most of Manhattan got curb cuts, and a wide-ranging accessibility regulation was enacted (Local Law 58 of 1987). But accessible taxis made little headway.
At a meeting held at Hunter College in 1996, the 504 Democratic Club (a disability rights group), DIA, EPVA (the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association, now known as United Spinal) and NYPIRG (New York Public Interest Research Group) formed a coalition for accessible taxis. Initially the core members included the chair Terry Moakley, Frieda Zames, Alexander Wood, and Marvin Wasserman. The Center for Independence of the Disabled, New York (CIDNY) was involved as well. The coalition dubbed itself the Taxis For All Campaign.
The new coalition began to make inroads, based in part on the argument that cities like Boston, Orlando and Las Vegas already had accessible cabs, and New York City needed to catch up. Perhaps surprisingly, Diane McGrath-McKechnie (Mayor Giuliani’s appointee to the Taxi and Limousine Commission, or TLC) was heard to say she thought that all cabs should be accessible.
The idea got mixed responses from the City’s political class. Politicians with no relation to disability wanted to keep a separate paratransit system. Others were more supportive but didn’t want to offend the taxi industry, which was then a major political funder and made clear its disapproval of the extra cost involved in making cabs accessible.
In 2001, Marvin was heading to work in Chelsea when he spotted a trio of accessible cabs in a parking lot. There had been no announcement, but there they were—three vans with wheelchair access symbols on them. As Marvin told me, “I ran across the street and grabbed a disposable camera because I didn’t think anyone would believe me!”
Around that time TLC issued rules requiring that every black car and livery fleet had to have ONE accessible cab or contract with a firm that had one. Most for-hire fleets took the contract-out option, but there were only a few such companies. Cab companies referred customers to them, but they often charged premium rates, improperly, and there were too few cars, so a lot of rides got declined outright. Complaints to TLC met with little response.
In 2004 Taxis For All began a push for greater visibility, which was highlighted by a “roll-in” of a number of wheelchair users at a taxi stand outside Penn Station. That fall the accessible yellow taxi fleet grew from three to 30—out of 12,487.
Taxis For All’s response was the best one-liner of the whole campaign: Edith Prentiss’ comment that accessible cabs were “like unicorns. You have to be pure to catch one.” Under criticism that only a quarter of one percent of the yellow taxi fleet was accessible, TLC announced a plan to expand to 2/3 of one percent, or 83 vehicles.
In 2011, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced his support of a bill to allow customers to hail livery (non-yellow) cabs where yellows were hard to find. A percentage were to be accessible—nowhere near enough, said Taxis For All. The taxi industry urged a veto of what it called a “damaging and vicious” bill. Meanwhile, the City announced that it had chosen a Nissan minivan to be the new standard yellow cab vehicle, which the City called “The Taxi of Tomorrow.”
The Taxi of Tomorrow was an unfortunate development in the accessible cab fracas, because while the Nissan car was already in use by cabbies in London (and every single one was accessible), the specifications issued by the City did not require ANY of the new cabs to be accessible. Instead, accessibility would be available as an optional retrofit, at a cost of ten thousand dollars.
Taxis For All responded aggressively, with protests against what it derided as the Taxi of Yesterday, and a federal class action lawsuit against TLC and the City. The suit contended that the Nissan car, and the state of the yellow fleet overall, violated the accessibility requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Plaintiffs included Simi Linton, Chris Noel, Taxis For All, DIA, United Spinal and the 504 Democratic Club.
The accessible cab campaign had gone into high gear.
Under pressure, on December 20, 2011, Governor Cuomo and the Bloomberg Administration announced a deal under which a new green cab fleet would be created, designated for for-hail service in the outer boroughs and northern Manhattan—up to eighteen thousand new cabs, of which twenty percent would be accessible. Additionally, 200 accessible yellow medallions would be sold, supported by a loan or subsidy program to encourage sales.
It was the Taxis For All Campaign’s biggest victory so far.
Amazingly, just three days later came final judgment in the ADA class action—and the ruling was in favor of the plaintiffs. As District Court Judge Daniels put it, “meaningful access for the disabled to public transportation is not a utopian goal or political promise. It is a basic civil right. . . The TLC must propose a comprehensive plan to provide meaningful access to taxicab service for disabled wheelchair bound passengers . . . Until such a plan is proposed and approved by this Court, all new taxi medallions sold or new street-hail livery licenses or permits issued by the TLC must be for wheelchair accessible vehicles.”
In this image: A 2012 photo of a woman in a wheelchair emerging from an accessible taxi.
In the span of a week the trajectory of Taxis For All had completely turned around.
Not to say that opposition had been entirely quelled. Mayor Bloomberg, for example, commented that “You just cannot generally take a wheelchair into the street and hail a cab. It’s dangerous and a lot of the cab drivers would pretend they didn’t see you.”
The year 2012 was decidedly mixed for Taxis For All. It was good news for the campaign when the City’s Comptroller John Liu rejected the contract for the Taxi of Tomorrow. Although the new cab would have passenger airbags, sliding doors, USB ports, a sunroof, even a “low annoyance” car horn, Liu stated that “City Hall's refusal to provide wheelchair-accessible cabs to people with disabilities is inexplicable, and we believe it violates the ADA. We should not go ahead with a so-called Taxi of Tomorrow that perpetuates a shamefully separate and unequal cab fleet for another decade.”
But in June came a shattering disappointment--the victory in the ADA class action was reversed on appeal. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals held that “T.L.C’s failure to use its regulatory authority [to require accessibility] does not amount to discrimination within the meaning of the A.D.A.” Plaintiffs appealed to the US Supreme Court.
The uneven news continued into 2013. The City Council declined to vote on a proposal to require a 100 percent accessible taxi fleet. Instead it went forward with a bill that would nullify the accessibility requirement if the cost of running an accessible taxi was 5 percent or more above a non-accessible taxi. “That's a loophole big enough to drive a fleet of cabs through,” commented Taxis For All.
The City then floated a proposal for an accessible dispatch system for the 233 accessible yellow cabs. The proposal was limited to rides that began in Manhattan. Nonetheless, TLC argued that this proposal constituted equivalent access for passengers with disabilities, even assuming that the ADA applied to taxis. Taxis For All representatives Edith Prentiss and Jim Weisman denounced the proposal as “second class,” “segregated,” and “Jim Crow.”
Finally, in December 2013 came a settlement of the ADA class action, and the upshot was that the taxi fleet had to be 50% accessible by 2020. It was precisely half a loaf, but it meant that people with disabilities would have a decent shot at being able to flag down a cab. After thirty years of fighting, the community hailed it as the important victory that it in fact was. Indeed, it was the first comprehensive accessible taxi agreement in the nation.
Since then, the taxi dispatch service (known as e-hail) has been extended to include outer borough pickups, but with a capacity of 1200 rides a day, it is tiny compared to Access-A-Ride’s daily total of thirty thousand rides. Other lawsuits over the Taxi of Tomorrow were resolved, and the Nissan car began appearing on the City’s streets, only to have its exclusive role abandoned in 2018, after numerous issues arose with the design.
In this image: A 2015 photo of attendees at a “roll in” protesting Uber’s lack of accessible taxis.
Over the past few years the taxi industry, and the accessible taxi campaign, has been upended by the sudden rise of app-based cab companies like Uber and Lyft. With a fleet comprised exclusively of independent contractors driving their own vehicles, they are not medallion-based and their regulatory status was an open question. The Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled (BCID) brought an ADA lawsuit against the companies, but it was unsuccessful.
In 2018 TLC adopted a rule requiring that Uber, Lyft and the like had to have 25% of their fleets accessible by 2022. Uber brought a lawsuit, which was settled on terms that gave it the option of meeting a wait-time requirement instead of a numerical accessibility requirement, namely, that by mid-2021, the companies must service at least 80 percent of requests for wheelchair-accessible vehicles in under 10 minutes and 90 percent in under 15 minutes, or they must associate with a company that does the same.
The pandemic has delayed some of the milestone dates. As of earlier this year, just thirty percent of the yellow fleet was accessible.
Forty years of organizing, lobbying, suing, and bargaining across opposing interests, discrimination, recessions, pandemics and technological changes, to get a third of the way towards Sandra Schnur’s dream.
Pull this tale out of your pocket the next time someone needs educating about why the Disability Rights Movement isn’t done yet.
