When Uber and Lyft showed up in Portland, lots of people were thrilled to have another for-hire transportation option. But the peer-to-peer transportation network company’s arrival highlighted a problem: unequal access for people who require wheelchair accessible vehicles.
Law students at Lewis & Clark came up with the “Portland Equal Access Plan” (PEAP) as a way to combat this disparity. PEAP was designed to insure that wheelchair users in Portland have access to for-hire transportation services provided by Uber, Lyft, and traditional taxi companies.
City Council didn’t adopt the PEAP, and instead decided to lift all regulations on for-hire transportation for a 120-day pilot period while the city collects data and decides how to proceed.
But the law students aren’t waiting for the city’s data, and today they launched a study to find out just how unequal access really is.
Historically, Portland required taxi companies to maintain a certain percentage of wheelchair accessible vehicles (WAVs) in their fleets. This arbitrary fleet standard has failed to deliver an appropriate level of transportation service for wheelchair users. Worse, because the fleet standard has not been applied to appbased companies, like Uber and Lyft, the share of WAVs available to wheelchair users in the citywide forhiretransportation fleet has eroded. PEAP would replace the old fleet standard with a service standard applicable to all forhiretransportation companies, taxis and appbased alike. The transportation companies, free of arbitrary fleet regulation, would then be free to determine the most efficient means to achieve the PEAP service standard.
The law students are now collecting data to inform Portland policymakers about WAV demand levels and the response times necessary to insure an appropriate level of service available to wheelchair users. Anyone who has requested a WAV from any taxi company or any appbased transportation network company, like Uber, is encouraged to use the link below to complete the survey. No personal information is collected and all data will be used to better inform Portland transportation policy decisions.
Leslie Hallan, who’s one of the students participating in the study, says they’ve begun collecting data but are choosing not to disclose how long they’ll be gathering data so as to not skew the results.
They want you to take their survey! You can do it here.