Complaints Skyrocket as Access-A-Ride Users Struggle to Get Cabs
On a Friday afternoon in August, Michael Ring, 56, was trying to get an Access-A-Ride (“AAR”) taxi from the Gramercy area in Manhattan, where he volunteers at a hospital, to return to his Park Slope home.
Ring, whose arm movement is limited due to Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare neurological disorder, is one of the 1,200 paratransit passengers in the MTA’s on-demand e-hail pilot program, which enables them to use a smart-phone app to book rides in taxis equipped to handle disabled passengers.
Five or six times, Ring said, he booked an AAR cab ride, only to see the driver cancel his order. He suspects it’s because it was a Friday afternoon when such a regular taxi trip would net about $45, but the driver would get only half that fare if he was picking up an AAR passenger. Ring eventually had to take the subway, which can be dangerous for him.
Ring’s experience is not unique. Last June, the city’s transit agency received more than 641 complaints per 100,000 AAR journeys, an increase of 52 percent from June 2018, according to a report recently released by the MTA. In comparison, there were about three subway and nine bus complaints per 100,000 journeys in June.
More than 150,000 New Yorkers rely on the paratransit system, and most of them are not able to take public transportation due to disability or old age. The system is run by MTA’s New York City Transit Authority. On average, about 665,000 AAR trips were booked each month in 2019.
The substantial increase in complaints started in March, when the number skyrocketed to 523 per 100,000 journeys from 314 in the previous month. This coincided with when the MTA cancelled its “advance reservation e-hail” program, which enabled AAR users to book a taxi or a for-hire vehicle one or two days in advance. It was replaced with an initiative called “enhanced broker service” in which passengers are assigned a taxi, a for-hire vehicle or a traditional van or bus — all depending on availability.
The new initiative, which was intended to expand taxi usage for paratransit system, has made it more difficult for many AAR customers to get a ride.
“The users I’ve spoken with are pretty universal in saying that there is nothing enhanced about enhanced broker, and they want the e-hail back,” said Shain Anderson, a community organizer for AAR with the Center for Independence of the Disabled, New York, a nonprofit organization that advocates for people with disabilities.
The problem, says Anderson and others: A few months ago, many taxi drivers started to get paid for trips with a flat rate calculated by distance, which is usually lower than the metered fare. “They don’t count the waiting time or traffic,” said Mohammad Maruf, 25, who drives a yellow cab and picks up three or four AAR rides a week. He added that the difference between a flat and a metered fare could be more than $30 for a long ride.
Cab drivers, already feeling pinched by competition from ride-share services like Uber and Lyft, say they don’t want to take a loss by transporting AAR passengers.
“They said, ‘You’ll be able to stay in this program, keep getting trip requests, have so many jobs and you’ll be making more money’,” said Nancy Reynoso, a 48-year-old green-cab driver, recalling what she was told by the MTA at the beginning of the program. “And now, you are not making this much money.”
Reynoso said 95 percent of her rides were once for AAR passengers, but now she has as few as three such jobs a day.
Unlike other AAR passengers who reserve their trip through the MTA, on-demand e-hail participants can book a taxi using an Uber-like app on their phone. But they have learned how difficult it can be to get a taxi for paratransit, especially during rush hours.
Sometimes when he does manage to book an AAR taxi, Ring said, drivers tell him they picked him up only because they couldn’t get other passengers. Other drivers become angry when they realize it is a flat-rate ride. “I don’t like to be told, ‘You are better than nothing,’ or ‘You’re a mistake,’ ” he said. “Why are they paid less to transfer disabled people than they do able-bodied people?”
The Taxi & Limousine Commission, which is a partner of the MTA in developing the e-hail program, said in an email that “drivers can always choose whether they would like to accept a flat-fare offer, and are never obligated to accept an e-hail trip.”
For most AAR users, the lack of taxis during key times means that they must rely on the traditional system, which is plagued with such issues as late pickups, or long journeys because other passengers must be picked up or dropped off during shared rides.
“Access-A-Ride is a lifeline, but also a big stressor for persons with disabilities,” said Lauren Pine, 52, an amputee who keeps meticulous records to file complaints to the MTA.
Francesca Falco, 61, whose son has autism, said they have not been able to get a taxi since March. And the alternatives often fail. One time, her son was stuck in a paratransit vehicle for three hours because there were so many other passengers, she said. “Imagine if a MTA rider on the subway has to experience three hours… it would be chaos.”
Falco said she tried in vain to find out what criterion the MTA operators use to dispatch cabs or vans. The issue came up at a Transit and Bus Committee Meeting in March, when Alex Elegudin, NYCT’s senior advisor for systemwide accessibility, said that “customer preference is now one of numerous criteria, including the trip route, taxi availability, customer’s accessibility needs. … To run an efficient and sustainable paratransit program, we do need some ability to control when taxis are utilized or not.”
Some cities have deployed cabs for paratransit with more success. San Francisco is a leader in taxi integration with paratransit services, according to a report published in 2016 by the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management at New York University. Using taxi services to substitute for some paratransit trips significantly reduced costs and improved customer satisfaction, the report said.
On-demand users book their taxi rides through Curb Mobility, a taxi technology company. Curb was the only e-hail AAR service provider when the pilot program started. According to an NYCT document from July 2017, Curb was to be awarded a 12-month pilot contract for an estimated $11.6 million. “Pricing is based on a fixed price per trip based on distance. The estimated average price per trip is $35.91,” said the document.
In January 2019, the Transit and Bus Committee approved the award of another three-year contract worth $116.5 million to Curb to provide paratransit broker taxi trips in New York City outside of Staten Island.
AAR passengers and taxi drivers say that when they complain about the flat rates, Curb and the MTA blame each other.
Neither Curb nor the MTA responded to questions from Transit New York.
