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Taxis Come to Aid of Disabled By MATTHEW ARTZ

Friday January 07, 2005

Before Berkeley introduced wheelchair-accessible taxis last summer, Patricia Berne’s world didn’t expand beyond a few blocks from a BART station.  

Now, on a whim, she can travel to Ocean Beach, Berkeley Marina, Fourth Street, her mother’s house, or even Emeryville. 

“It sounds trite, but it’s so cool to be able to go to a giant theater or Trader Joes,” said Berne, a nonprofit consultant, who rides a motorized wheelchair. 

Berne said she takes a taxi about twice a week, which makes her one of the most dependable customers of a service that hasn’t yet gained a strong following. 

“It’s been slower than we anticipated,” said Vicki Riggin, paratransit manager for the Friendly Cab Company, owner of Berkeley’s three wheelchair-accessible cabs. Riggin said Friendly gets between five and 10 calls a week from disabled clients for the specially designed minivans that can serve both ambulatory and wheelchair-riding customers. 

San Francisco’s Yellow Cab, by comparison, reported receiving 75 calls a day from disabled customers. Riggin attributed San Francisco’s higher volume of calls to the city’s hillier terrain and its inclusion of wheelchair-accessible taxis as part of its federally mandated disabled transit program, which means qualified riders get subsidized rides. 

Berkeley Councilmember Dona Spring, who uses a wheelchair, attributed the service’s slow start to a lack of awareness among disabled residents and steep prices. Alameda County’s subsidized disability transit buses and vans cost $6 for a trip to San Francisco and $3 to Oakland, compared to the taxis, which charge the standard meter price. Spring said the taxis cost her about $27 to San Francisco and $7 to Oakland from her Berkeley home. 

Those who qualify for the city’s taxi voucher program, available to low-income disabled residents, can use the vouchers to subsidize the taxi rides. 

To encourage taxi companies to buy wheelchair-accessible vans, Berkeley offered five new permits, above the city’s 120-taxi quota, for the specially designed cabs. Friendly, the only company to accept the city’s offer, benefits from having more cars it can lease to its drivers, who are independent contractors. Nevertheless, Riggin said the company has lost money on the service. 

She said that Friendly paid close to $40,000 for the minivans, nearly double the price for the standard Ford Crown Victoria sedan, adding that the added time to assist a disabled person into and out of the van eats away at driver profits. 

“We’re basically doing this out of the goodness of our hearts,” Riggin said. 

Yet nationwide, the demand for wheelchair-accessible taxis continues to grow. Sundance Brennan, Commercial Sales Manager for Freedom Motors International (FMI), the company that re-fitted Berkeley’s vans, expects his company to double sales this year from 120 taxis to at least 250. FMI charges between $8,500 and $12,000 to make standard minivans wheelchair-accessible. 

The surge in sales, Brennan said, comes from cities either encouraging companies to buy the taxis or requiring that they do so. Chicago requires one out of every 15 taxis to be wheelchair accessible and Harrisburg, Pa. recently required that seven percent of its taxis be accessible. By contrast, London’s entire fleet has been wheelchair accessible since 1989. 

Berkeley users say the four-month-old service has been indispensable. “Now I have the freedom to do things in San Francisco,” said Miya Rodolfo-Sioson, a member of Berkeley’s Commission on Disabilities, which lobbied for five years to bring the taxis to Berkeley. 

Before the taxis hit Berkeley streets, disabled residents had to rely solely on county-run paratransit buses and vans, which require passengers to reserve cars up to a week in advance and are notorious for slow rides. 

“One time it took me two hours to get to San Francisco for a medical treatment,” said Councilmember Spring, who now takes the taxis to doctor’s appointments.  

Although Friendly also asks for advanced notice, Berne said a cab is usually available if she calls on the fly. 

“It gives me the freedom of mobility that other people enjoy,” she said. Berne added that AC Transit buses weren’t well equipped to properly secure her mechanical wheelchair, so when she traveled she would have to wheel herself 20 blocks from her house to BART. 

Berkeley’s wheelchair taxis are here to stay, but the lack of ridership could keep the fleet from expanding. When the program started, Friendly offered to take all five permits, but the city, hoping to involve other companies in the program, only offered three.  

No other taxi company sought the permits, and now Friendly, which has five wheelchair-accessible taxis in its fleet that serves both Oakland and Berkeley, says its drivers aren’t interested in paying the roughly $150 in fees for Berkeley’s two remaining permits. 

“The drivers told us they make more at the Oakland Airport and don’t need a Berkeley permit,” Riggin said. 

San Francisco taxi companies aren’t sold on wheelchair-accessible taxis either, said Hal Mellgard, general manager of Yellow Cab. His company started a wheelchair-accessible pilot program in 1994 and now owns 25 of San Francisco’s 75 accessible taxis—about five percent of the city’s fleet. 

“We kind of did it for PR,” Mellgard said. “They don’t make money.” Wheelchair-accessible taxis, he added, cost three times more to maintain than Crown Victorias, and because many drivers don’t want to deal with the hassle of helping a customer into and out of the van, Yellow has to lease the cars to drivers at a discount to get them on the road. 

Mellgard and Kevin Ito, a Friendly executive, said they hope that their cities will one day subsidize the service either, in Friendly’s case, by allowing them to charge increased fares or, for Yellow, by paying the difference of the lease price charged to drivers. 

Public subsidies for wheelchair-accessible taxis are fairly common. This year New York City offered 16 percent discounts for wheelchair-accessible taxi permits, said Terry Moakley of the United Spinal Association. 

Bill Langston, a Friendly driver who leases a wheelchair-accessible car, said he enjoys giving rides to his new clientele. 

“They’re really interesting people,” said Langston, who after four months on the job said he can get a customer into and out of the minivan in under a minute. “Every time I pick up a new passenger they’re elated. A lot of them didn’t know the service existed.”