The city’s Transportation Commission is debating a resolution to help cab companies in Madison purchase accessible taxi cabs.
The resolution proposes the creation of a grant open to all licensed taxi companies in Madison for $250,000 to buy accessible taxis. The grant would be available to all cab companies in Madison, and not just the one that offers accessible cabs.
Currently, Union Cab is the only on-demand taxi service in Madison that offers accessible cabs. Other accessibility options, like the city’s paratransit program, require at least 24 hour notice for a ride.
Ben Lyman is a Transportation Planner with the Greater Madison MPO. He says that the purpose of the resolution is to give folks with disabilities more options in finding rides if they can’t give notice until the day of.
“The vehicles themselves are in short supply in our area, and often result in people not getting rides in a timely manner as they would be able to if they could use a non-accessible vehicle,” Lyman says.
Bill Carter is the business manager at Union Cab. He says that they only have about seven working accessible cabs in operation, and those cabs are all almost a decade old.
“Some drivers do not like driving aging vehicles,” Carter says. “They rattle, they make noises, they unnerve the drivers, they unnerve the passengers. We have our own maintenance staff and those vehicles are maintained, but just the fact that they are older and we buy our vehicles used, it doesn’t take a long time for a used vehicle to go from working and not making any noises, to where it starts to make noises.”
The newest accessible cab in Union Cab’s fleet is from 2014, with some vehicles being as old as 20 years, Carter says.
The lack of accessible cabs was exasperated last year, when Zerology, the parent company of Madison Green Cab, shuttered its doors. Ben Lyman says that while the direct impact of their sudden closure was minimal, it created a chain of events that put even more pressure on the strained system.
“When Green Cab services ended, and when all of the Zerology services ended, then all of a sudden the same number of rides needed to be provided by the fewer remaining vehicles and drivers on the road,” Lyman says. “So suddenly, accessible or non-accessible (vehicles), Union Cab suddenly had a lot more demand than they could meet.”
This is not the first time this resolution has been discussed by the council. During budget deliberations back in November, Alder Erik Paulson first introduced the resolution to be included in the 2023 budget. But that resolution was rejected, with the city Finance Committee saying that it needed more information on how it would operate.
Paulson says the plan being discussed tonight is a more fleshed out version of what was introduced during the budget.
“It is the same plan that we had as sort of the base line plan that we had indicated in the proposal, because after thinking about it, we haven’t thought up anything much better than that, but we’ve spelt it all out now,” Paulson says. “It’s more ‘here’s what’s going to happen, here’s not what’s going to happen’ sort of thing, which we didn’t have in the fall version of this.”
The Transportation Commission will not vote on the resolution tonight. Instead, tonight’s meeting is more about ironing out the details about the proposal.. Alder Paulson says it should get a final vote by the commission at their January 25 meeting. After that, it would still need to be approved by the Common Council.
Photo courtesy: Mandell Smock / UNSPLASH
