Ending the Uber wait

It was just four years ago that the Taxi & Limousine Commission approved smart-phone based car services. Uber has since grown from zero vehicles to 62,965, adding as many as 500 per week. So dominant is Uber now, it averages 285,000 rides a day, more than all 13,587 yellows combined and twice the total of its hail-by-app competitors.

But where 2,168 wheelchair accessible yellows cruise the streets — a number that’ll triple by 2020 — to provide transportation to people with disabilities, Uber and the other new guys have all failed.

A standard Uber typically takes a minute or two to arrive. The wait for one of Uber’s 61 — count ’em — wheelchair-accessible vehicles (WAVs) is much longer. Yesterday, we checked in Manhattan: 12 minutes in the morning, 24 in late afternoon. Rules mandate “equivalent service” for all. TLC Chair Meera Joshi is right to say enough. Her plan, being considered today, would make Uber and the others dispatch at least 10% of their trips using WAVs starting next year. The floor would then rise 5% a year, reaching 25% in 2021.

The car-services object and are proposing a consortium to do the job. Let them try it.

Meantime, the TLC must move forward on Joshi’s far more concrete plan, which will finally end the painful waits.