New York City is synonymous with taxi cabs. Whenever a movie or television show features New York, the streets are filled with yellow taxis, and plenty of scenes take place inside the cabs themselves.
Scenes like these make me wonder what happens if you use a wheelchair, like me, and you need a vehicle specifically designed to be able to transport you and your wheelchair. The standard taxi cab is useless to you. How do you get around New York City spontaneously, like everybody else? You can’t just step out of your front door and flag down any old cab. And even though the streets of New York are teeming with taxis in these movies and television shows, none of those cabs are ever wheelchair accessible.
If you use a wheelchair and want to go somewhere in New York City, it’s much more complicated than it is for these walking fictional characters. That’s why, in 2011, some disabled people filed a federal lawsuit against New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC), which regulates the taxi industry. The complaint stated that 98 percent of the vehicles in the city’s fleet were not wheelchair accessible.
In 2013, a settlement was reached that required the city to ensure that the taxi fleet would be 50 percent wheelchair accessible by the year 2020. Some progress was made in the ensuing years. In a 2024 court filing, the plaintiffs acknowledged that 32 percent of all authorized permits and 42 percent of all active permits were currently awarded to wheelchair accessible cabs. But, the same filing said, that this increase “falls far short of [TLC’s] court-ordered commitment, much less their moral obligation.”
By 2020, the TLC had not achieved the mandated 50 percent benchmark. Plaintiffs agreed to extend the deadline to the end of 2023—then 2023 came and went and the commission still failed to reach its accessibility requirement. Earlier this year, the TLC requested the presiding judge relieve it of its obligations under the settlement. Fortunately, Judge George Daniels turned the city down flat, instead giving the taxi regulator two weeks to produce a detailed plan for achieving the required 50 percent-accessible fleet.
When Daniels officially approved the settlement agreement in 2014, he wrote that it was “historic.” He called it “one of the most significant acts of inclusion since Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers” and “an act of a city that equally values all of its residents and visitors.” And now the city is trying hard to weasel out of that same settlement agreement.
It’s clear that the city does not equally value its residents and visitors who need wheelchair-accessible taxi cabs to get around.
Judge Daniels also wrote about the settlement, “Decades from now, most will take it for granted.” Let’s hope that someday wheelchair-accessible cabs are so commonplace on the streets of New York City that we’ll even see them in movies and television shows.