Imagine going anywhere, any time you wanted in New York City for $2.75 a trip.
Most people don’t think much about being able to hop on a subway or bus.They can wait an extra 30 minutes for a flakey friend to show up, or take up a random invitation to swing by a gathering on a whim.
But the 160,000 commuters with disabilities in the MTA’s Access-a-Ride program have to book their rides and plan their lives 24 hours in advance. The essential New York City experiences that depend on spontaneity or on-demand transport have not been available to them, at least not until a radical pilot program launched in late 2017.
A select group of paratransit riders are allowed to hail a taxi using an app or call center—any time and as often as they want. No caps on the number of rides they take. The program, called the “On Demand E-Hail Pilot,” resembles Uber or Lyft except users only pay $2.75 a ride.
And therein lies the challenge: The MTA says the average e-hail on-demand trip costs $37, meaning the agency is paying a lot for each ride and the program’s success has made it financially unsustainable. While the 1,200 pilot users account for just 0.7% of the 160,000 total paratransit users, they take about 35,000 trips a month, or 5% of the total Access-A-Ride trips.
“When the trip volume goes up by such a significant [amount], that's really where it impacts the bottom line,” said Craig Cipriano, acting president of MTA Bus and acting senior vice president, NYCT Department of Buses. “Looking ahead, you know, a sustained funding source would be really needed as we look to expand this over a full customer base.”
Late last year the MTA decided that it would end the unlimited ride option over its high cost. Instead, the MTA would double the number of participants to 2,400 but cap the number of rides they can take to 16 rides a month.
And the MTA will no longer foot the entire bill: Riders will still pay $2.75 up front and then cover anything over the first $15. MTA Chairman Pat Foye says there’s no other way.
“Expanding it across all users without caps would be something we couldn’t financially afford,” he told state legislators earlier this year.
The users of the original pilot program are bracing for the change, which could come any time between April and June of this year.
“Here's the thing about progress, you can't go back,” Xian Horn told Gothamist/WNYC. “I am absolutely devastated because what I believe is happening is they’re calling it expansion, but it’s a quiet, subtle eradication.”
Horn, who has cerebral palsy, relies on two ski poles to help her navigate New York City. She’s a freelance writer and public speaker, who lives in the same Upper West Side apartment in which she grew up. She says before the pilot program it was hard to keep up with appointments because every day had to be planned 24 hours ahead, a key component to the traditional Access-A-Ride transit alternative for commuters with disabilities.
“This is not about money, this is about life,” Horn, who has launched an online petition opposing the proposed cuts, said. “We can always find more money, but there are some people who don’t have the luxury of more time.”
Listen to reporter Stephen Nessen's story on WNYC:
The entire budget for Access-A-Ride last year was $614 million. The e-hail on-demand program cost about $16.8 million, just 3 percent of the MTA’s paratransit budget.
When the pilot started in November 2017, the MTA just wanted to see if it was possible to use taxis to provide paratransit service to 200 customers. That number gradually grew to 1,200.
“Now we're in a place where we've got to find a way to do it really at large scale, for the whole customer base and to do so in a sustainable way,” said Alex Elegudin, the senior advisor for system accessibility at the MTA.
The MTA breaks its paratransit users in the pilot into low, medium and high users. Low users take 0-4 rides a month, medium take 5-25 rides a month and high users take 25 and above. During the on-demand pilot phase, the MTA found low users increased their trips tenfold, medium users doubled, and high users increased their trips by 30%.
And the MTA found that the median number of trips a user took is 16, which is how officials settled on capping rides at 16 for phase two of the on-demand pilot.
In addition, the state agency is asking the city to cover half of all the paratransit costs, up from the one third of costs it currently pays. Mayor Bill de Blasio has asked for an independent audit of the paratransit program before he gives the MTA more money.
Xian Horn in the back of a taxi in a trip covered by Access-a-Ride.
Xian Horn hopped in a taxi on a December night headed to the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum on the Upper East Side. She had just finished a meeting with a financial advisor in Lower Manhattan, which had been pushed back an hour at the last minute.
The driver, a 30-year yellow taxi cab veteran named Ahmed Mahmoud, said with all the shocks to his business, being part of the MTA’s paratransit program was a nice boost.
"Honestly, it gives us a good business. And the fare, you don't have to look for change or the credit card is declined, and it improves the business,” he said. “Honestly we’re happy to help them."
Cabbies who choose to participate use the Curb app, and the MTA negotiates prices for specific zones. So a trip from Lower Manhattan to the Upper East side costs $25. Some drivers told us that the flat fee was lower than what they’d make on the meter, especially when there’s traffic, but if they don’t have any customers it’s a good way to get paid.
At the Cooper Hewitt, Horn bumps into a friend of hers, Shenik Ruiz, 28, from Bushwick, who like Horn, has Cerebral Palsy, but unlike Horn, Ruiz relies on the traditional Access-A-ride program.
Horn told her she was about to head to yet another event, a fundraiser downtown.
“I would’ve loved to go,” Ruiz said, but the last-minute change would leave her without a ride home. “You're always going to fun stuff,” she told Horn.
State lawmakers are sympathetic to users of the initial, unlimited-ride pilot program. There is state legislation pending that seeks to double the number of users to 2,400 but continue to offer them unlimited rides.
State Senator Leroy Comrie is sponsoring the Senate bill that’s still in committee.
"The MTA owes it to the long suffering paratransit public to continue to expand the pilot absent hard caps and restrictions. And we're going to work with you to ensure that happens," Comrie told a group of advocates at a rally in January.
Advocates argue that other cities have more generous programs. Chicago subsidizes $27 per day and up to 8 trips a day, Boston pays up to $40 and has varied tiers of users that goes up to 40 subsidized trips a month, Washington D.C. covers $15 up to four trips a day, according to calculations by CUNY graduate student Jessica Murray, and Jennifer Van Dyck, with the group Rise and Resist Elevator Action Group.
The MTA remains unmoved. Elegudin said the changes to the program should not have a big impact on people’s lives.
“This was an added bonus,” he said. “You had the ability to have some spontaneity, but ultimately our traditional service which has improved is still available to you."
Horn disagrees. The cap on rides, she said, is a huge change: “It’s kind of a sad thought, thinking, ‘2020 what am I going to give up this year?’ Instead of what am I looking to expand in my life?"
