Call an Uber. Call a Lyft. That is now the answer to nearly every transportation question. At the airport, just tap the screen and watch a little car move toward you on a map. It is a marvelous system, unless you use a wheelchair that can’t be folded into a trunk. Then the car on the screen becomes a taunt. Transportation is everywhere. On-demand transportation for me is nowhere.
Transportation everywhere, but not accessible
This is the accessibility bargain of the rideshare era. Transportation network companies, or TNCs, gave millions of travelers more convenience while helping to hollow out companies serving people who can’t use a sedan. A national airport survey found taxi trips dropped five to 30 percent and shared-ride customers fell 18 to 30 percent as TNC use grew. Taxis are highly regulated by local jurisdictions, and while far from perfect, they do have strict accessible vehicle quotas. TNCs don’t.
At Los Angeles International Airport, shared-van trips fell by about two-thirds between the first halves of 2016 and 2019, while Uber and Lyft trips more than doubled. TNCs didn’t cause every failure. But they took the high-volume trips that helped pay for dispatchers, trained drivers, backup vehicles, and vans with lifts.
An accessible van is not an ordinary car with good intentions. It requires a ramp or lift, tie downs, a trained driver, and an informed dispatcher. That is a transportation system. The TNC model, built on personal vehicles and rapid turnover, avoids those costs. The market calls that efficiency. Wheelchair users may choose another word.
Accessible rideshares available 0-25% of the time
The numbers are bleak. Tests summarized by the National Council on Disability in 2025 found an available Uber or Lyft wheelchair-accessible vehicle in only 26 percent of attempts. Standard vehicles appeared every time. At two major airports, 17 attempts produced no accessible vehicle. Even an accessible option shown in an app may exist only in part of a region or during certain hours. When it disappears, the traveler may be told to reserve well ahead and pay several times the ordinary fare. In the Baltimore area, an airport trip costing about $17 to $20 by app was quoted at approximately $135 to $175 in an accessible vehicle. Equality, apparently, comes with a surcharge.
Accessibility is not a special favor to be arranged three days in advance. It is the test of whether this celebrated transportation revolution serves the public, or only the portion of the public that can climb into the car.
At an airport, this lack of options can mean a missed flight, an unplanned hotel bill, or an unaffordable emergency ride (often from a medical transportation provider). The nondisabled traveler gets spontaneity. The disabled traveler gets contingency planning.
Successful lawsuits but little change
The courts have repeatedly been asked to clean up what the market leaves behind.
SuperShuttle is a repeat offender. In 2002, the Department of Justice settled with SuperShuttle after a passenger waited about six hours at Dallas/Fort Worth while inaccessible vans arrived every 15 minutes. Investigators found that SuperShuttle had purchased roughly 880 nonaccessible vans and about 17 accessible vans since 1990.
Several airports had no accessible vehicle. The agreement required accessible capacity, training, and comparable response time, fare, geography, hours, reservations, and availability. In other words, it required the company to treat its disabled passengers the same way it treats its non-disabled customers.
Now, more than 20 years later, they are still failing. Garrett v. WHC Worldwide alleged that SuperShuttle’s operators advertised accessible service, then repeatedly reported that no wheelchair-accessible vehicle was available. The nationwide settlement approved in June 2026 is designed to fix it. It requires accessible booking throughout service areas and operating hours, at the same price as comparable service, training, maintenance policies, and court-backed enforcement. Yet service may still require as much as 72 hours of advance notice. That is better than no ride. It is still not the freedom enjoyed by the passenger who lands, collects a bag, and decides what to do next.
The cases against Uber and Lyft offer a sharper lesson. In Crawford/Namisnak v. Uber and Lowell v. Lyft, wheelchair users proposed changes to create accessible service where meaningful service did not exist. Uber and Lyft prevailed after trial because the plaintiffs had not proved that financial incentives, rental, dispatch, or fleet proposals would reliably produce service. The rulings didn’t establish that TNCs can never be required to provide wheelchair-accessible vehicles. But they did place the burden of proving exclusion and designing and validating the company’s solution squarely on the shoulders of the disabled. One might have thought that designing the transportation company was the transportation company’s job.
Other disputes have filled in pieces of our broken system without repairing the whole. O’Hanlon v. Uber, the Equal Rights Center’s agreement with Uber, and federal settlements involving Lyft have addressed problems like wait times, driver refusals, unequal hours, and failed backup service. Each remedy has value. Together they expose the problem. The inaccessible market is national and structural; the remedies are local, fragmented, and painfully specific. These cases arise mainly under disability law, but older adults needing the same vehicles, assistance, and dependable service face the same consequences.
We are the public
I do not mourn the loss of shared van service at the airport because it was familiar. I mourn the loss of a basic public expectation: a transportation system should transport the public. Airports and regulators gave TNCs curb access, staging areas, and enormous reach. They can demand something in return: measurable equivalent service, perhaps a surcharge on every TNC trip to support accessible rides, pooled regional dispatch, enforceable backup service, and public reporting of completed rides rather than screenshots showing an accessible button and its phantom ride promise.
Lawsuits will remain necessary when companies promise access and deliver excuses. But civil rights cannot depend on a stranded traveler finding a lawyer, becoming a plaintiff, waiting years, and then explaining to a multinational platform how to run an accessible business. Wheelchair users, older adults, and their families deserve more than an app icon and an apology. They deserve a ride. Accessibility is not a special favor to be arranged three days in advance. It is the test of whether this celebrated transportation revolution serves the public, or only the portion of the public that can climb into the car.
John Tschida is vice president of the Access Press Board of Directors.
