Metro

MTA won’t give cancer survivor door-to-door service

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It’s been a rough ride for a 69-year-old, retired school teacher from Brooklyn.

The MTA is refusing to provide door-to-door “Access-A-Ride” service for ailing grandmother Iris Marcus, who fought off stage-three breast cancer seven years ago but says she can’t walk more than several steps without feeling severe pain from a degenerative back disease and diabetes-induced ulcerated feet.

For six years, the Midwood senior relied on Access-A-Ride to commute to her doctors and other destinations.

But those rides came to a screeching halt in May when she tried renewing the service — only to be told by an MTA-designated health-care examiner that she’s “functionally capable” of riding trains and buses.

Marcus reapplied again in July and November but was rejected by the cash-strapped agency both times — even though she had notes from five doctors stating she can’t use trains and buses because of the long walks and stair-climbing associated with getting to them.

“I understand there’s budget cuts, but what do I have to do to get service? Cut my legs off or hurt myself walking, so I’m bound to a wheelchair?” the senior told The Post.

Marcus said her biggest fear is that her cancer may return because of her inability to get to her doctors.

Without Access-A-Ride, she said, she’s been unable to get to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan for an overdue mammogram exam, cancelling an appointment in September.

“When I was 7, my mother died from breast cancer. It ruined my entire life,” Marcus said.

She’s also been forced to cancel many other appointments with nine different doctors treating her for a variety of ailments, saying car service is too expensive and that her husband, Ricardo, “can only rearrange his schedule so many times” to take her.

The senior’s dilemma has state Assemblyman William Colton (D-Brooklyn) accusing the MTA’s NYC Transit of trying to cut spending at the expense of snubbing the law.

He said the agency is violating the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires mass-transit operators to provide alternate local transportation for disabled people.

Colton wrote the US Justice Department’s civil-rights division last week demanding an “intervention” and “full-scale investigation” of how NYC Transit evaluates its Access-A-Ride applicants.

He said he contacted the Justice Department — which says it will review the matter — after reaching out to NYC Transit President Thomas Prendergast on Marcus’s behalf but getting nowhere.

Prendergast, in a Feb. 6 letter to Colton, said the agency stands by its decision.

Besides Marcus, Colton said, his office regularly receives complaints from disabled persons claiming they’ve been unfairly dropped or rejected from the program.

About 169,000 New Yorkers, mostly seniors, are registered to use Access-A-Ride. The program has been hit by severe budget cuts the past three years, while its operating costs have soared.

The service now provides about 22,300 rides a day — roughly 4,000 fewer than in 2009.

In 2007, NYC Transit revised its system so that all applicants had to be interviewed and examined at an assessment center by agency-designated health-care professionals.

Colton questioned why the agency is “paying little attention” to applicants’ private doctors.

NYC Transit spokeswoman Deidre Parker said the policy change “was not a cost-reduction or cost-efficiency action.”

Way to go — NOT!

The “best” mass-transit option for Iris Marcus to travel to her endocrinologist monthly:

* Walk about two blocks to the Avenue N station for the F train.

* Walk up four flights of stairs (52 steps) to the train platform.

* Take Queens-bound F train 29 stops to 71st Avenue/Continental Avenue station in Forest Hills.

* Walk along platform, climb 18 steps, cross to the Manhattan-bound R and M lines, then go down 18 steps to the R and M platform.

* Take R or M one stop to 67th Street.

* Walk up four flights of stairs (44 steps) to reach street level.

* Walk a block from 67th and Queens Boulevard toward 66th Street.