Council Seeks Even More ‘Green’ Taxis
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Less than a month after Mayor Bloomberg agreed to expand by hundreds the number of “green” and wheelchair-accessible taxis on the streets, the City Council is looking for more.
Lawmakers are considering a series of far-reaching bills that include proposals to create a central dispatch system for wheelchair-accessible cabs and to convert the city’s entire fleet to fully accessible, hybrid cabs by 2015. Other measures would provide incentives for operators of hybrid taxis and would toughen requirements for car services.
Advocates and opponents of the proposals packed a City Hall hearing room yesterday as disabled New Yorkers pleaded for access to the city’s taxis while industry representatives told lawmakers that the costs of abiding by the proposed rules could put them out of business.
In introducing the package of 11 bills, council members are looking to push an administration that they say has – at least until recently – moved too slowly in bringing the taxi fleet into the 21st century. “It’s not a matter of advancing these bills, really. It’s a matter of advancing these issues,” the chairman of the council’s Transportation Committee, John Liu, said at yesterday’s hearing.
Lawmakers expressed exasperation at the responses of officials from the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission, who said they supported the intent of the bills but refused to endorse any of them in their current form. “If you agree with it, you’ve got to do it,” a council member from Brooklyn, David Yassky, told the commission.
City officials maintain they are moving quickly to make taxis more environmentally friendly and fully accessible, and they say some of the council’s proposed laws aren’t needed while others go too far, given the existing technology for wheelchair-accessible and alternative fuel cabs. “If the vehicles don’t hold up, then everyone gets egg on their face.” the Taxi and Limousine chairman, Matthew Daus, said in an interview after the hearing.
New York City Transit offers an Access-a-Ride service for disabled customers, but reservations must be made a day or two in advance.
