If Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani wants fast, fare-free buses, will he also consider making Access-A-Ride (AAR) free for disabled New Yorkers? This is one of the questions Able News received in a questionnaire ahead of a recent interview with the incoming mayor.
The answer seemed hopeful when the Mayor-elect acknowledged that “transportation is the second highest barrier to employment for disabled New Yorkers.”
One user of AAR is Stefan Euntre Henry, a mechanical engineer for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), who, because of his spinal cord injury, uses the service to get to work. AAR trips, which must be pre-scheduled a day prior, cost $2.90 per ride.
For an hour-long car ride, Henry needs to request a pickup time three hours in advance without a guarantee of being on time, making him one of the 180,000 paratransit customers subject to having their pay cut or losing their job due to late arrivals.
“I got docked pay because at the time I was working a job I wasn’t allowed to stay overtime and Access-A-Ride would excessively bring me over late so I would lose an hour or two hours,” he told Able News through text. “I lost a good amount of money because of it and it was pretty noticeable around my bosses. I did not get fired but it became a serious hindrance towards my work.”
Alas, the incoming mayor did not give any reassurance to reduce the program’s fare for people with disabilities who have limited income and very few alternate transit options, saying:
“Access-A-Ride is tied to the bus system, and I think one of the things that I have heard from many disabled New Yorkers is the importance of ensuring that it is a system that is actually dependable. And we’ve seen that ridership with Access-A-Ride has increased. I think that is something to be celebrated,” Mamdani said.
“I think we have to continue to not rest on our laurels, however, and ensure that we’re actually delivering the best kind of service, because even when it comes back to buses or Access-A-Ride, or, frankly, public transit as a whole, you cannot convince New Yorkers to use these forms of transportation unless they can see in the example of that transportation that it is in fact the most convenient, most reliable, safest form of transit,” the Mayor-elect said.
Jessica Murray, an organizer with the Rise and Resist Elevator Action Group, which advocates for expanding access in the subway, said that “AAR ridership is up because our population is aging and our other modes of transportation don’t work for them.”
Only a third of the New York City subway system and 86% of Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) stations are accessible and currently, the MTA’s $68.4 billion 2025-2029 Capital Plan to get accessibility improvements for 60 subway stations and six LIRR stations, with congestion pricing as the main funding source, is underway. As Mayor, Mamdani can recommend four members to the MTA’s 23-member Board.
Still, the pro-busing mayor- to-be, said that the lack of subway accessibility is pushing disabled New Yorkers to buses.
“We know that close to double the number of riders on buses, as opposed to subways, are disabled. And that’s, I think, a reflection of the fact that buses are accessible in a manner that subways are not,” Mayor-elect Mamdani told Able News when answering questions on transportation.
However, the opposite is true for Eman Rimawi-Doster, a campaign organizer with New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, who is an above and below the knee amputee with lupus.
“I can’t ride the buses in Harlem because they are full of elders with disabilities who use mobility devices, which is wonderful. But there’s no space for me,” she emailed Able News. “Once I waited for four different buses and ended up stuffing myself onto the bus and nearly falling because there was no space for all of us.”
Accountability is the word that describes the way Mamdani plans to fix the city’s accessible transit crisis:
“I remember the last time we were speaking, you had asked me a question specifically around subway accessibility, and that’s one of the most prominent examples to me of a promise that has long been made and denied,” he said. “And that, to me, is one of the things that I’m looking forward to is the use of my bully pulpit, the use of my office, and my administration to actually hold accountable to those promises so disabled New Yorkers can trust them as opposed to have to go through the same kind of ordeal every few years of fighting for that which has already been promised.”
This is the second story in a multi-part series from an exclusive one-on-one interview with Able News staff writer Christopher Alvarez at his Manhattan office last week where Mamdani discussed employment, transportation and housing.