Mayor de Blasio is proposing a 30-cent surcharge on all taxi rides to make the city’s yellow cab and outerborough limousine fleet more wheelchair accessible.
De Blasio called the surcharge a “major step forward” to make taxis easily accessible for all of the city’s residents.
“We are turning a corner here,” de Blasio said. “New Yorkers with disabilities have fought for years to secure basic fairness in transportation. With the concrete rules and plans we are putting in place, we’re finally making an accessible taxi fleet a reality.”
The Bloomberg administration opposed plans to make taxis and limousines handicapped accessible for the past decade, finally agreeing to a settlement with disability rights groups in December 2013.
“I think one thing that is clear is people in wheelchairs can’t go out into traffic and try to flag down a cab,” Bloomberg said in December 2011. “It just starts to get dangerous.”
But sources close to the de Blasio administration said Bloomberg left the new mayor with no roadmap to finance an upgrade to taxi vehicles – so they came up with the surcharge which would put about 7,500 vehicles on the road by 2020.
The City Council will consider the plan at an April 30 hearing, according to a City Council staff member.
Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez, who sponsored taxi legislation last year, called the plan a “major win” for the disabled community. And disability-rights attorney Jo Anne Simon said upgrades to make the vehicles in compliance with the law are “desperately needed.”
“It’s been a fundamental inequity that has existed for far too long, and a small surcharge is a progressive way to pay for it,” she said.
City residents said the extra quarter and a nickel surcharge would not dissuade them from taking cab rides in the future.
“I’m a New Yorker but I take cabs as a matter of convenience and for 30 cents I’d still take them as much,” Helen Roth Lein, 59, said. “Nothing will change.”
Manhattan homemaker Rachel Cook, 37, said she’d still hail a cab but hopes the vehicles are nicer than the current models.
“Sure, sure I’ll pay — except the handicapped cabs are so terrible to ride in, they’re clunky and bumpy,” she said.