Organizer’s Forum: Topic – Accessible Taxis
TUESDAY, April 15th
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Background
The Organizing Workgroup of the National Disability Leadership Alliance hosts these calls the third Tuesday of every month as a resource for disability organizers, in an effort toward building the organizing capacity of the disability community across the country. They generally follow the format of a Welcome followed by 2-3 experts in a given area speaking for a few minutes on their experiences, advice and challenges. The calls include a 20-30 minute question and answer period.
To ask questions via CART: Sign-in to the Chat function on the right side of the transcript and type your question. One of the call facilitators will read out any questions posted there.
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- Say your name before each time you speak
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So you can mark your calendars now, Organizer’s Forums are held on the 3rd Tuesday of every month. If you have suggestions for call topics or presenters for upcoming topics, please email them to jlehman7@gmail.com or dcoleman@cdrnys.org.
Looking forward to talking with you all!
Jessica Lehman and Diane Coleman
Co-Chairs, National Organizing Workgroup
Date: 04/15/2014
Event: Organizers Forum
This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
>> Diane, it looks like the link to the chat wasn’t working. Are you on? Are you having that problem too?
>> I am just now signing on so let me see. I don’t know how that happened because I used it last month and I thought it fixed it last month
>> Jim: This is Jim Weisman.
>> Hi Jim.
>> Hi, I’m on, Jessica.
>> Jessica: Hi, Carol. So I’m going to send a quick e mail to everybody with the corrected captioning link. What shows up in the e mail is correct but when you click on it the link that it goes to is not the same so anyway this will be in your in boxes shortly and please forward it so we can make sure we don’t lose anybody.
>> Hello, everybody.
>> Hi, everybody.
>> Hello.
>> Hello.
>> Jessica: We’re just getting everyone on.
>> Spinal Cord Injury Ontario.
>> Lori Hill with coastal (indiscernible) independent living.
>> Terry Altman.
>> Austin, Texas.
>> Diane: This is Diane. The captioning link does work if you cut and paste it into your browser as opposed to using the hyperlink. That’s what you were saying, Jessica.
>> Jessica: Jim and Carol, I forgot to ask you all to do the kind of opening. Do you want to do introductions or would you rather skip it so you have more time?
>> Carol: I can do quick introductions.
>> Jessica: Okay, great. I mean like asking people on the call to introduce themselves. Is that what you mean too?
>> Jim: Oh. Jim, that’s your call. How long do you think it will take?
>> Jessica: Maybe five minutes.
>> Jim: Up to you. You know what to do.
>> Jessica: Oh, no. He go ahead, Jim.
>> Jim: You make the decision because this is your forum.
>> Jessica: I think we should do it because it sounds like we have some new folks on today. I’m first going to mute everyone because it’s a little bit hard to hear so hold on one second. Okay. So I’m going to go ahead and get started. Welcome, everybody. If you I will un mute people for introductions but if you want to speak before then or if like Diane and Jim and Carol, you may want to go ahead and hit star six to un mute yourself.
So welcome to the Organizers Forum. My name is Jessica Lehman and I’m the co chair along with Diane. So and Diane, do you want to go ahead and introduce yourself?
>> Diane: Sure. I’m Diane Coleman. I’m a member of the steering committee of the National Disability Leadership Alliance and we’re the sponsors of the organizing forum call. And I’m with the organization Not Dead Yet.
>> Jessica: Thanks. And NDLA that Diane mentioned is a National Coalition of Cross Disability Organizations working to increase the social economic political voice of people with disabilities. The Organizers Forum was designed to expand and support community organizing within the movement and so this call is one way we try to do that. If this is your first time on please mark your calendar in general. We always do this call on the third Tuesday of the month, same time and then in between the calls because we recognize that an hour a month is not enough to really tackle some of these issues, we do have a Facebook page, it’s Organizers Forum so please go to that and we have a ListServe through Yahoo, you can go to Yahoogroups.com and search for Organizers Forum, all one word, and click join. There’s very little traffic on that so you won’t be bombarded with e mails but that’s a great say we can follow up on the calls.
I would encourage participants and/or speakers on today’s call to either please during the call or afterwards put a quick note on Facebook or on the ListServe saying oh, I really liked this comment that someone said or I have this question or this stood out to me so that people who aren’t able to be on the call can hear some of it and so that we can all continue the conversation. So the calls we alternate between issue based topics like today and more kind of strategy or outreach kind of topics so next month we’re looking at the language that we use around disability and kind of how we think about that as organizers. We’re always looking for new ideas so let us know if you have some. This call is captioned and I apologize again that the link was not working right but if you type in the address or cut and paste it, it does work so hopefully everyone who wants to be on the captioned site can do that.
And you just log on with user name and password forum and you can type questions there if you like and we can read those on the call. Diane usually takes on that job wonderfully. Remember to speak slowly and clearly which I am not doing a great job of. I apologize. And please say your name before you speak. I put everyone on mute now because we have some background noise but for the dialogue at the end of the call when everyone’s un muted, two things, one is please just keep yourself muted if you’re not speaking and if you can’t do it right on your phone you can always hit star six to mute or un mute yourself. And please don’t put us on hold. We’ve had problems withhold music that is hard to talk over or impossible to talk over so if you need to step away for a moment, just hang up. You can always call right back.
Let’s see, when I mentioned the ongoing discussion I forgot to mention that we also have a website that the center for disability rights in Rochester maintains so that is disability leadership.org and you’ll see Organizers Forum and you can go there to see transcripts or hear recordings of past calls and then to see when the next call is about or, you know, get the conference line information, any of that.
I think I covered it. I always ask Diane what I’ve forgotten.
>> Diane: I don’t think you forgot anything. I’ll just say that if anybody does want to send in a question to the chat function I’ll be glad to read that to the group as soon as I have the opportunity.
>> Jessica: Great, thank you. So before I turn it over to the speakers, let’s do some quick introductions. I guess I better un mute everybody first so hold on again. Okay, now we can hear everybody. So let’s start with the West Coast and just briefly say your name and organization.
>> (Off microphone) independent living resource center, San Francisco.
>> Jessica: We already have hold music. All right. So this is why we ask everyone who is still on, never put us on hold. I’m going to mute everyone so hold on. Okay, so unfortunately I’m going to have to ask everyone to hit star six to un mute yourselves and then we can continue with introductions. So we got someone from independent living resource center San Francisco and was that Mark from Silicon Valley?
>> Why yes, it was.
>> Jessica: Great. Welcome. And who else do we have from anywhere on the West Coast? Okay, how about the Midwest? Or anywhere in the west. Colorado, Utah.
>> This is Mary Mille in from summit independent living center in Hamilton, Montana.
>> Jessica: Great.
>> And also (indiscernible) from north central independent living services in Great Falls, Montana.
>> And this is Joel Segan from summit independent living center in Hamilton as well. Jess great. Anywhere else from I’m going to broaden the middle of the country, Illinois, Wisconsin, Kansas? And if you’ve just joined, hit star six to un mute yourself so we can hear pup.
>> Well this is Billy Alton from April, also parts unknown.
>> Jessica: Great. How about the south. Who do we have from the south? I think we’ve lost some people to mute, unfortunately. Moving up the East Coast, how about Washington, D.C., Maryland, that area?
>> Denise McMullin from Delaware.
>> I’m in Miami, Florida, my name’s Mark Dubin, I’m with the center for independent living in south Florida.
>> Jessica: Great.
>> This is Terry Faultman in Texas. We’ve got a muting problem. (Off microphone).
>> (Off microphone) here in Austin, Texas.
>> This is Rebecca Williams. I’m with the southeast ADA center.
>> Peter (indiscernible) is also on the call with Spinal Cord Injury Ontario Canada.
>> Jessica: Wonderful. I’m sorry, I didn’t ask for Canada. And how about the thank you. How about the northeast? New York and everywhere else around there?
>> Bonnie Raymond.
>> Jessica: I heard been on Friday from.
>> United Spinal (audio cutting out) campaign in New York.
>> Jessica: Great.
>> (Indiscernible) from Boston. Jess does the Boston person want to go first?
>> Sure. It’s Ken Meyer at the disability commission in Boston.
>> Jessica: Oh, great. And who else?
>> I’m Kelly from Boston.
>> Bill Allen.
>> And Diane Coleman from Rochester. I’m sorry.
>> Jessica: And Bill Allen I think I heard?
>> Yeah, disability policy consortium in Boston.
>> Jessica: Okay, great. So if you haven’t introduce yourself from anywhere in the country, please hit star six to un mute yourself and then go ahead and tell us who you are.
>> John Scheiber, Vermont Center for Independent Living in Vermont.
>> (Indiscernible) in Casper, Wyoming.
>> Tracy door man (indiscernible) in Bennington, Vermont.
>> (Indiscernible) independent living in Montpelier, Vermont.
>> (Indiscernible) Odessa, Texas and Austin.
>> Sam list, chairperson of Vermont’s statewide independent living council.
>> Amber Shroman, Vermont Center for Independent Living.
>> Shawn Kelly, Not Dead Yet.
>> Jessica: Anybody else? All right. I realized the tricky part of asking you all to un mute yourself for introductions is now the only way to make sure it’s quiet for our speakers is to ask you all to un mute yourself again with star six. So everyone who un muted yourself please hit star six again. Sorry. We are always figuring out technology here together. So with that, thank you, we have a real good group. A lot of people from independent centers and adapt and some commissions and hopefully that will be helpful to our speakers to have an idea who is on the call and I’m going to turn it over to Jim Weisman and Carol Tyson who are from United Spinal to share our topic about taxis for all.
>> Jim: Okay, Carol, you’re up.
>> Jessica: Carol, you must be muted. Hit star six again.
>> Carol: Okay. Hello?
>> Jessica: Hey there, hi.
>> Carol: Hi. I apologize. This is Carol. I am a senior policy associate here. This Washington, D.C. and we also have Jim Weisman who is going to speak, he’s our senior vice president and yen counsel for United Spinal and I’m very excited to have Peter and I’m going to let him pronounce his last name again when we get to it from spinal cord injury Ontario and we’re just going to do our best to give a brief rundown of what the ADA says about accessible taxis and then each of us is going to talk about our experiences in our respective cities and in between we’ll talk about sort of arguments for and against elements of the different campaigns and sort of various current industry issues that have come up.
And I just wanted to recognize that we are not the only organization or individuals doing this work so to everybody on the call who is also doing it I’m very excited to talk to folks afterwards and we’re just really happy to share experiences and to hopefully grow, organizing efforts. With that I will pass it on to Jim.
>> Jim: Thank you, Carol. I really am impressed by the geographic spread of the people who called in which proves that this issue is vital I think in lots of communities, either because there’s not a lot of alternatives to taxi or because taxi is the missing link in your transportation system.
We’ll talk about how it works in big cities and suburban areas and rural areas too to show you that it can work for everybody. I’ve been involved in transportation struggles for a long time and taxis have always been kind of a verboten area, nobody was talking them. When we did ADA when I was involved in the ADA transportation section drafting and also the regulation writing for ADA, when we did ADA the necessity of taxi was obvious the necessity of taxi was obvious. It wasn’t that people with taxis were superfluous in transportation because you remember we addressed private and publicly operated transportation so it wasn’t just mass transit we were talking or government sponsored transportation we were touching but the taxis were sedans. There were no accessible sedans to speak of and we said if a van seats eight or less it had to be accessible if it was used as a taxi.
There’s Ark argument that you could provide equivalent service if you’re a taxi but that doesn’t mean you can do nothing. So clearly vans were being purchased all over the United States since ADA passed probably in your community right now, being used taxis, (off microphone) being used at taxis and there is no alternative. They don’t have something well we’ll pick you up with this car, not that car. They just have inaccessible vans violating the law. The Justice Department, while this is the U.S. Department of Transportation rule, the Justice Department would have to enforce it and to date no one has enforced it. And the United States attorney’s office or in the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. The New York state attorney general recently had something to say about it and wrote the Justice Department telling them that in New York there are vans operating that aren’t accessible, maybe they should do something to define a van for people. But other than that I’m unaware of any activity to enforce that part of the regulation.
Meanwhile, taxi service all over the country felt like it had gotten a pass and behaved that way. When we have questions and answers if your community is an exception, we would really like to know about it, you know, if somebody’s been providing accessible taxi service reliably and predictably for a long time, that would be great to find out about.
And also vehicles were a tough issue, converted vehicles, and I’m going switch into my New York City experience now, converted vehicles being operated sometimes 24 hours a day, many New York yellow cabs or 24 hours, and they fall apart. They rattled, they’re not a luxurious ride. Able bodied people would not like it and wheelchair users would not like it either because it’s just a it’s better than nothing but a Toyota that had been running for three years on New York City industries, Toyota Sienna, this was a traditional conversion, they were falling apart. New York activists about 15 or 16 years ago formed the taxis for all campaign. Taxis for all campaign were the same people involved in making mass transit accessible in New York City plus younger people, a newer generation of working disabled persons.
We have 100,000 lift equipped bus uses in New York City every month and it’s been like that for 20 years, almost 20 years since our buses were 100% accessible. And those people are making trips at, you know, 8:00 in the morning and 5:00 at night and they are work trips and they are people with income who are people with disabilities who are using mass transit and who would be taxi users with their discretionary income and were demanding access.
And and we’ll spend some time on this in a little while, and there are people with no alternative to taxis except para transit, ADA operated para transit, and that was costing the taxpayers, right now it’s $66 a ride and the user pays $2.50 so it’s $68.50 a ride and most taxi rides are cheaper. I mean, the overwhelming majority.
So these rides could be shifted. Nuanced, you would have to be a guaranteed right if it’s ADA or at least you couldn’t deny people because of all the ADA reasons that you’re not loud to deny rides for paratransit like capacity, we don’t have enough vehicles. But you could eventually have a load shift that would save a lot of money.
And we kept pointing this out over and over again to government. They weren’t listening. The New York City taxicab industry is unusual in that in Manhattan where there are 13,000 yellow cabs, you’re not allowed to call them. You can’t request one. You just have to go out in the street and hail one. New York City activists in the beginning of this maybe ten years ago, 12 years ago, got them to add 231 taxis to the fleet of 13,000, and those 231 have to be accessible, had to be accessible.
The city mandated that they buy a car called a Chevy uplander and then have it converted. They did. The cars fell apart and were taken off the road. Of course, just like when the first lift equipped buses came into New York or other cities and the lifts broke, the product failure was blamed on people who needed the product, not the people who designed it or provided the service. That is, people with disabilities took the wrap for the first generation of lift equipped buses baking down and the first generation of the taxis breaking down. Politicians ran the other way. They were afraid of the issue. And in New York each of those 13,231 cabs I told you about requires a medallion. A medallion is purchased at auction and the city gets a money.city offered medallions at about (indiscernible) that’s $13,231,000,000 worth of medallions driving around Manhattan below 96th Street. And the donors of $13 million worth of assets to make it available, if it was another industry wouldn’t sound like much of a stretch because these guys are millionaires but the industry is looked at as the cab driver, and the media covers taxi stories as being cab drivers. And in some cities in fact there are. In many cities it’s owner operators. No one realizes the big business behind it in some cities.
Governor Cuomo did and created a way two and a half years ago we made a deal, first we sued them, by the way, under the Americans with Disabilities Act. We alleged that reasonable access to the taxi system was required and the court agreed with us. The U.S. Justice Department filed a statement of interest in the case that said every taxi should be accessible, specifically said that. Because the city so regulated taxis that it was like a city operated service.
After we won in the lower court, governor Cuomo actually it’s a couple days before we won in the lower court governor Cuomo made a deal with us and the Yellow Cab owners to put 2,000 more medallions up for sale. Add to the Yellow Cab fleet and they would all have to be accessible.
In addition to that in the other four burrows of New York City, Brooklyn, Brocks, Manhattan, queens, Staten Island, Manhattan being below 96th Street hail only, and above 96th Street just like the other burrows, you could only dispatch cabs, you could only call a base, a garage to get them. This is very difficult to do if you’re a person with a disability. There were 30,000 of these cars, we call them liveries, and of those, 23 were accessible and we’re talking about only a couple of years ago. So you had 23 accessible out of 30,000 in most of the city and then in lower Manhattan, 231 out of 13,231. Governor Cuomo said we’re going to eight cabs and we’re going to take money from the medallion sales and identify the accessibility features and we’re going to add livery services in the burrows that are accessible and we’re going to do about 6,000 of the 30,000 which can be dispatched and we’re going to create hail service in the burrows other than Manhattan where there was none for some of these cabs, and they will not have to buy medallions, they’re buying very inexpensive permits and there will be a first generation might number of them and they will increase in value, much like the medallion did, if you butte a taxi medallion to be a taxi owner in 1930 it was $10. Now it’s a million.
So there’s a real equity base to pay for accessibility improvements in cabs which are probably 14 or $15,000 over the base price of a cab.
When Governor Cuomo did this it required Mayor Bloomberg who had been an outspoken of accessible taxis for 12 years of being a mayor except for one month, the last month he changed his position on his way out the door which was great for us. Governor Cuomo had kind of forced this for us with our mayor and there was litigation all around the taxi owners sued to stop it. It went back and forth. So as not to bore you I will tell you that as of April 23rd I think it is in this month we are having a hearing in New York City on a rule that will make everything happen that I just told you except it will be even better because when Bloomberg in the month before he resigned was going out the door and his taxi commissioner who the new mayor announced after he was elected but before he was sworn in he would fire, the two of them pledged to make 50% of yellow cabs accessible in the hail a cab system. This is a remarkable development. If they sell 2,000 new permits we’re talking about 7,500 accessible yellow cabs in a very short amount of time. By 202050% of the fleet will be accessible and remain accessible if not all of it just because of what, you know, the trend to make things accessible. And I think we will redefine the word taxi just like we redefine the word bus in America. Public transit bus, when you say bus one know it’s an accessible bus now. And I think when we say taxi in New York City in a few years you’ll know it’s an accessible taxi.
And what does it do? I mean, it makes people mobile. You can work late, come in early. You cannot rely on paratransit. Paratransit operators can load shift and save money, Medicaid can load shift from privately operated ambulets and save money. Certainly in some cities it saves money. And even in the smallest rural countries, this guy sits at home and waits for his phone to ring to be your taxi operator will be getting more calls because he will become a Medicaid carrier because he’ll be accessible because he’ll be accessible and he’ll get more calls. In suburban it provides them to provide feeder systems, converter systems and express bus systems which makes people employable who weren’t so I think it’s a terrific thing. And each struggle the questions and every disability advocate knows that debunking disability issues is a full time job and you do it once and you go to the next city or the next town or the next employer and it’s the same exact thing again and again and again. Well, we are having this city by city in the United States. We’ll talk a little bit about vehicles in a little while but I want to turn it over to Washington and Ontario. So go ahead, Carol.
>> Carol: Thanks, Jim. So this is Carol. I’m in DC. And I’m going cut myself a little short but try I’ll mention that we put up all of the resources and documents that we’re referencing we put up on our United Spinal website and I’ll send a link, I’ll post it on the Facebook page and try to 50 to the ListServe so people can get this. We have a hole whole cheat sheet that lists everything and that has links as well so if you missed any of this we just want to share as much as we it.
So I started doing this work a year ago and a few months in Washington, D.C., could not be a more different taxi system. We don’t have medallions. All you need, it’s a very open system, all you need to be a taxi driver is just to get a license and go through some training and that’s it so it’s very different. We have right now 20 wheelchair accessible cabs and that is .03% of all of the cabs in the city, which is definitely not enough. And our what we’re saying here is that we want 100% of our taxi fleet to be accessible. And we a law was passed in 2012 that sort of reorganized our taxi industry a little bit. Not a whole lot. Mostly cosmetic changes like they all have to be the same color and they have to accept credit cards but they also created air disability advisory committee and we were tasked with it was supposed to be in just a few months but writing a pretty lengthy report investigating ex, exploring the various issues around accessibility and taxicabs, and we were the committee is comprised of disability advocates, city, agency officials and a taxi taxi representatives as well. We worked for a year and we submitted our report in February and it is online for anybody to see and it is very comprehensive and we hope people find it useful and we recommended 100% accessibility.
When we started, when the committee started our taxi commissioner, chairman Lentin was sort of privately saying that he was for accessibility and he has since come out in several public venues saying that he would really like before he leaves to get to 100% accessibility. We have a whole lot of work to do. We are now just in the stage of trying to get a campaign, a more public campaign together. But I just want to reiterate what Jim said. DC could not be any more different than New York City in terms of our taxi industry but the arguments against accessibility and for accessibility have been exactly the same. The taxi folks have said he the same things, and we find a lot of the same players even though the industry is fairly different. Excuse me.
So a lot of the arguments against have been higher costs because of the larger vehicle, and then also that people with disabilities need a special service that can only be provided by very sensitive, very highly trained individuals. We wouldn’t want to trust that service to just any cab driver. That has been the biggest arguments against. The biggest arguments for are the employment argument, that everybody deserves a right to all forms of transportation, that he it’s a civil right is what we say here quite often so we’re talking we have in our report a whole list of different financing options that we think are available, at least here in DC, ranging from applying for federal grant money to sort of more innovative private, public partnerships and just a whole host of things.
And then I just want to say before I get off that the taxi industry I think in this country, and I’m not sure about Canada, is very much in flux as we respond to these new services called transportation network companies. And I don’t know how if they are in places that aren’t bigger cities but here in DC we have groups like Uber and Lift and side car, various ride chair services that allow people, private operators of vehicles to sort of connect with each other but also serve alternatives to taxis to sort of crop up. And the taxi industry here is very much feeling like it’s competition. I think for our community the important thing is that most of these vehicles, if not all, are not accessible and they’re not really talking about making them accessible. They’re talking about they’re addressing this in California so people there can talk about this. We have a new bill here in DC and they’re not even thinking about accessibility so that’s all I have to say about DC. If anybody wants to call me here, get mere background, I’m very open. Please call me anytime. But I’ll pass it off to Peter in Ontario. And Peter, you might need to hit star six.
>> Peter: Can you hear me now?
>> Carol: Yes, we can.
>> Peter: My name is Peter and I’m the manager of public policy for an organization called Spinal Cord Injury Ontario in Ontario, Canada so we service all of Ontario which is one of 12 provinces around Canada. Ontario is the largest province among the rest of the provinces and has the largest population of people with disabilities amongst Canada. That’s a little bit of the geographical background.
In terms of what we’ve been working on over the last two years, I guess I’ll start with current state, what we’ve done in terms of a campaign to achieve better accessibility in the taxicab industry and what we hope our future state is going to look like. So in terms of present state, we too in Canada are dealing with similar challenges as New York and DC has described. We function more similarly to a New York model where we don’t have medallions but we have licenses that people purchase. The equity plate value in Toronto, Ontario is about $300,000, not a million, but that essentially licenses you to drive a vehicle and allows you to hire one other driver to utilize one vehicle for a 24 hour shift so everybody does 2 12s per vehicle. Currently we have public three about 3,500 taxis in Toronto. 3.5% of those taxis are wheelchair accessible. The challenge we have in Toronto with regards to the 3.5% is that every single one of those taxis are, contracted out to our parent transit. Therefore there is zero on demand service in the city of Toronto.
This has been going on for many years and there’s been many groups tried to increase the on demand service. There’s been a lot of trickery going on where people have been who have been contracted out to paratransit are going on the road and charging flat rate fees to people on the streets like we’re talking like a $40 ride for just going a few blocks because they know they need the ride and they have no other alternative. There’s been a lot of negativity around the taxi industry and the disability community because there’s been some unreasonable, unfair situations that have gone on.
In the last couple years we’ve had a real opportunity to create some real good change. For one, our city has decided to conduct a taxicab review so they were looking at all aspects of the taxi industry and our goal was to ensure that accessibility was part of the agenda and that they would have to do an evaluation of the accessibility within their taxi review.
We were very fortunate a couple of years ago to ensure that that happened so we knew that there had to be some kind of evaluation from the city to be able to measure its accessibility against our Ontarians with disabilities act.
We also are hosting the Parapan Am games next year so that was another motivating factor for us to really push the city hard in introducing how we will be viewed to the rest of the world, whether we’ll be able to accommodate all our visitors and showcase ourselves as a world class city. That was another motivator we’ve used to launch a campaign against the city.
We initially angled the actual licensing commission first before we even approached council or the mayor as they were responsible doing the review, and initially what we did was we got them on board through a letter writing campaign, through many meetings and many discussions and many papers and articulating our points for the need for an all purpose vehicle. We purposely use the terminology all purpose vehicle and continuously highlighted that whether you’re a soccer mom with five kids, whether you use a wheelchair, whether you have a stroller or whether you’re going to the airport and have a lot of luggage or whether you want to go grocery shopping and have a lot of bags that need to be transported, we need a vehicle that accommodates all. That was our approach we took.
We eventually started lobbying all the counselors and got our membership behind us and we were actually really successful on February 19th to be able to get council to vote on 100% accessibility over ten years so this has been a really big win for us and the brokerages have already appealed, saying that the city is being unreasonable but we’re being told that they don’t have a leg to stand on because the review was so thorough and it took over two years to examine all the evidence before making a decision so we are very pleased with the result and we’re happy to share any resources or any information that helped us get to that point. And that’s all I have to share unless anybody has any specific questions.
>> Carol: This is Carol. Thank you so much, Peter. Jim, I don’t know if there’s anything else you wanted to add before we did Q&A.
>> Jim: Carol, can you hear me?
>> Carol: Uh huh, yes.
>> Jim: Oh, good, okay. I wanted to just talk about vehicles for a minute. There’s a lot of talk about vehicles going on. There is one vehicle being manufactured, and Ronnie Raymond who called in and I actually visited the factory in Mishawaka, Indiana, which is near south bend and it is an old hummer plant and it is making the MV 1. This vehicle has been in and out of production but it’s under production by an enormous company called AM general and they’re serious about making an accessible kind of SUV, van, meld of a car it looks and if you look at the materials that Carol referred to you can link to it too to see it.
But it can be used as a taxi and it can also be used as a private car but this will be a factory built accessible vehicle and its price is it’s pricey. It’s about $45,000. Crown Victoria was $25,000. They don’t make them anywhere, those big Fords that used to be taxis a lot. But it is being used by our New York City transit authority as a paratransit vehicle. They buy them and use them as paratransit vehicles as opposed to the big vans. They have many big vans, but our paratransit costs are 575 million a year. That’s for New York City. And our Medicaid ambulet cost is 200 million a year just to take poor wheelchair users on medical calls so we’re talking about almost $800 million transportation that could be transferred and that’s why the $45,000 price or the $25,000 van with the $15,000 conversion may not be so daunting because there’s a lot of money that can be invested besides medallion money in making it happen.
The side entry vehicles and rear entry vehicles, the MV 1 is a side entry. Right now it’s only on one side. If you’re on a one way street that can be a problem. However, next year’s MV 1 that’s being mated for a taxi use will be a two sided side entry vehicle. Many of the conversions are rear entry vehicle conversions. New York City’s taxi of tomorrow which Bloomberg forced on us was a Nissan MV 200 which looks like a Ford transit sect connect kind of a vehicle. It was not designed to be accessible and is being converted by Braun to be accessible if people choose to buy that vehicle. It has an amazing way of entering it which may become the new way of entering. The straps that hook to your chair that guide you up the ramp become the Tai down and they are ratcheted so you can’t roll backward. And the same thing is true upon exit. It can let you out easily. Very good Braun invection to make the Nissan MV 200 accessible.
Some of these vehicles have automatic ramps for taxis. They are powered. If it was a private car of course you would want to drive it, you would need a powered ramp but the taxi has a driver who handles bags and wheelchairs anyway so perhaps I know that MV 1 is thinking that their two sided side entry vehicle will be ramp as manual, operated by the driver. And that may be the future. We don’t know what’s going to happen with this. You know, less moving parts, less equipment can break so people like it.
The material Carol told you about you should really check out because it’s kind of Carol collected what’s pretty much the state of the art or the state of the situation when it comes to making taxis accessible and what’s going on around the country and with vehicles and government so you’ve got some model statutes or some statutes to work from. The model agreements or agreements to work from too. Carol?
>> Carol: I think that’s all we have. It looks like we have a little bit less than ten minutes. I don’t know, Jessica, if you do the Q&A or if we should just throw open.
>> I have a comment around vehicles. Can everybody hear me? Am I un muted in.
>> We can hear you.
>> Okay, great. We also use MV 1 vehicles as well as the caravan and some of the others that you mentioned, James, as well, and we find those work well as well, particularly the side entry. In our city, Toronto specifically, we are only allowed side entry for safety reasons. Some of the busy streets in Toronto, they don’t allow the rear entry because it’s a little too dangerous so all our vehicles are side entry. We don’t have rye rear entry in Toronto only.
The other thing that I wanted to comment on is apparently there’s this new vehicle, all purpose built vehicle also being built in Turkey at a $22,000 cost. It’s not as great as the MV 1 with all the bells and whistles but it’s a very stripped down vehicle that’s meant to be a commuter vehicle and affordable to the driver so something to look into.
>> Jim: That’s a Caravan vehicle?
>> Yes.
>> Jim: They anywhere the taxi of tomorrow competition and they were the only accessible one and they actually won the online voting that the city ran but the taxi and limousine commission, despite the fact that cars in were selling taxis all over Europe announced that they weren’t reliable enough and they didn’t want to go with them so they went with Nissan which is too bad.
>> Peter: Interesting.
>> Diane: There’s a comment on the chat between from Amber Smock at Access Living in Chicago and she wanted to be sure, Carol, that you post the report you were talking about on Facebook.
>> Yes, I will. I just posted the link to the United Spinal website and I will follow that up with a link to our DC taxi commission web page that has our report as well. And I forgot to mention that if anybody needs any of these materials, I think I know the report on the taxi commission website is a PDF and I think that most of on you are materials on the United Spinal are also PDFs if anything needs that in an alternative format please just let me know. My e mail is Tyson, T Y S O N at United Spinal.org.
>> Jessica: If it’s okay with Jim and Carol, I’ll send out their contact information on the Organizers Forum ListServe and then Carol, we can also send out documents there and we can also post things on the website.
>> Carol: Yes, great. Thank you.
>> This is Bob in Montana and we’re running into obstacles. We have a taxi company interested in providing a fully accessible integrated system but they’re getting denied for insurance coverage for van equipped lifts and we’re wondering if anybody knows of any company that is writing that kind of insurance, short of the implications of denial but we’re looking for an insurance company that writes these kind of commercial taxi liability, you know, automobile insurance, thank you.
>> Jim: This is Jim from New York. This was raised as an issue. Not only availability but also price, you know, that the price made it un affordable in New York. It seems to have disappeared with the financial incentives we provided in the legislation in New York. And in the settlement agreement we’re doing with the city ordinance that we’re doing because there are financial incentives. But I will find out for you how our guys get their insurance.
>> I would really appreciate it if we could (audio cutting out).
>> Jim: You know, insurance is regulate bid states and it’s a little different area by area but I will find out who they’re carriers are for you. Can you send me our contact information Jessica’s going to get you so just send me an e mail and I’ll get right back to you with what I can find out.
>> Wonderful.
>> Peter: I would mention that too that in Canada we have one carrier that supplies taxi insurance to the entire country. And because nobody else will touch it and it’s through the roof. And that was one of the major barriers that we had in our lobby be effort was the cost of insurance.
>> Jim: You know, just so that people don’t get the wrong idea, there’s two issues with insurance. Don’t think it’s because they’re taking disabled passengers. That would probably just get lost in the sauce of premium rating but it’s increase in the cost of the vehicle and likely they’re going to be hurt in an accident and cost more than a traditional taxi would but we’ll get you the information as quick as I can get it.
>> This is David in Austin and my question is about with the addition of permits for cabs in Austin, what we’ve seen is that owner operators have often chose it to use their cabs with the paratransit vouchers that are provide bid the local transit authority and so effectively we helped develop miniature paratransit systems that then removed those cabs from service from the on demand response needs. You got any solutions to that?
>> Jim: Yeah, and somebody else raised that. I think Ontario had the same problem, right?
>> Exactly.
>> Jim: You know, it’s kind of a do you have a critical mass? How many cabs are there in Austin that are accessible?
>> There’s about 45 right now. Is that right? 45.
>> Jim: Out of how many?
>> Out of about 500.
>> Jim: I mean, obviously numbers are the issue. You know, you need more cabs. That’s the only way. Right now they’ve got guaranteed business and it’s all vouchered. That’s all they’re interested in. They’re not interested in, you know, sort of civilians, so to speak, who would need rides. So you’re going to have to either entice the industry or force the industry.
>> Jessica: Jim and Carol, this is Jessica. Go ahead, Mark.
>> But I am an ex New Yorker, in fact I’m back to visit mom in a couple weeks. I am surprised that no one has jumped in to start an accessible livery service, car service, call 6464 wheels. People are missing the boat in terms of there’s a business opportunity there.
>> Jim: Yeah. I agree with you and it’s happening in New York now. We’re going to get 20% of the liveries in New York and it will happen. The gray line in New York, the sight seeing service operates a little tour service too that’s accessible and you can reserve it like if you needed to go the airport kind of a thing but it’s been very almost impossible until now.
>> Jessica: So we have a couple minutes left. This is Jessica. Jim and Carol, I want to give you the last word but first it last month to send a big thank you to Jim Weisman and Carol Tyson from United Spinal for leading this call, for putting it together, for sharing a lot of great information. And as we said, we’ll make sure to pass more on through the ListServe and Facebook so everyone who is new here make sure you’re connected in one of those ways. And thank you to our captioner, the CART is a really important part of this call and it’s funded by the National Disability Leadership Alliance, so thank you for that. And I’ll turn it back to Jim and Carol for any final words.
>> Jim: Go ahead, Carol.
>> Carol: Hi. I apologize. I got dropped off for a minute so I think the last thing I heard was just the issue of all of the available taxis being used for paratransit and I just want to say that the only solution that I have right now in DC is that’s why we need 100%. That’s why we need all of these taxis to be accessible for everybody. And we do we talk about universal design and that once these are accessible taxis, they’re just going to be taken for granted and everybody’s going really appreciate how comfortable they are and how great they are for all members of the population. And I would be excited to talk to anybody and support anyone else who is doing this work.
>> Jim: That’s all I’ve got, Jessica.
>> Jessica: All right. Thanks, everyone. Please join us again on Tuesday, May 20th for our next Organizers Forum which will be on language. Thanks, Jim and Carol and thank you everybody for participating.
>> Jim: So long, everybody.
>> Jessica: Bye.
>> Carol: Bye.
(End of call)
This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.