Access-A-Ride Questions

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is in a desperate financial situation, but there is one service the agency is required to provide that costs close to half a billion dollars a year.

And even though the cost keeps rising, Fox 5 found out that because of the sensitive nature of the expensive program, it is not easy to look into potential abuse and waste.

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We start at a parade in Brooklyn. A guy carrying a banner is an NYPD Auxiliary Police sergeant named Jeffery Lawin. Lawin marched in the mile-long parade at a pretty good clip. What's strange is how the sergeant got to the parade that day.

Fox 5 saw him getting in an Access-A-Ride van outside his apartment in Manhattan. He headed towards the police precinct in Queens to meet up with others marching the parade.

Access-A-Ride is a well-intended federally mandated program that New York City Transit, part of the cash-strapped MTA, has to provide. The cost is enormous. It's estimated that the Access-A-Ride program in the New York area will cost more than $451 million in 2009. The passenger pays the normal $2.25 subway and bus fare, but each trip costs about $66. The public picks up most of the tab.

But the big grey area with Access-A-Ride is exactly who qualifies for it. First of all, it has nothing to do with money. You can be a billionaire. You could be broke. As long as you qualify, you wind up with a ride for $2.25.

Access-A-Ride is designed for people whose medical condition or disability prevents them from taking public transportation, bus or subway, for all or some of their trips.

Health professionals hired by the transit system decide if a rider truly needs help.

People who qualify for Access-A-Ride supposedly require door-to-door service, but curiously, Sgt. Lawin was dropped off a few blocks away from the police precinct in Queens. He walked the rest of the distance and then walked up the stairs.

On the very same block of the precinct, a woman who cannot even get out of a wheelchair told us she is very happy to take the regular bus. Buses, these days, are equipped for the disabled.

Back to Sgt. Lawin, who takes the expensive $66-a-trip Access-A-Ride. It gets more confusing because he takes the subway too. There's a subway station right outside of his precinct in Queens. He does walk with a limp, and transit officials say he qualified for Access-A-Ride, but that's all they can tell us.

There are hidden disabilities that you may not see, and because of strict federal laws that protect medical records, Fox 5, or anyone else for that matter, can't ask too many questions.

So we decided to ask Sgt. Lawin.

John: Sergeant, how are you doing? John Deutzman from Channel 5. How are you? Why do you take Access-A-Ride to work? Why do you take Access-A-Ride?

Lawin: I'm not a sergeant.

But he is a sergeant.

John: We have you walking in a parade, marching in a parade. Why did you qualify for access a ride?

Lawin: You've got the wrong person. I don't know who you're talking to.

From the marching sergeant to another weird Access-A-Ride situation.

The engine was running and the lights were on, but Fox 5 caught an Access-A-Ride driver asleep for about an hour outside of the Lower Manhattan Kidney Dialysis Center.

After a while we decided to wake him up.

The scene aggravated people who were outside waiting for their scheduled Access-A-Ride to pick them up.

One man with a cane just had dialysis, and his wife said Access-A-Ride is always a hassle.

The Access-A-Ride program has taken flak for scheduling problems as dispatchers try to coordinate more than 2,000 vehicles that are supposed to pick up people within 30 minutes of their scheduled time.

After an hour and a half of napping and doing nothing, the driver of the empty van that the public pays for took off without a passenger.

Although the driver never mentioned it to us, a transit spokesperson said the driver was on a lunch break during most of the nap we observed and that all the seemingly wasteful down time was caused by his passenger not showing up and an unusual scheduling issue causing a delay for his next pick up.

When transit officials propose fare increases or tightening the rules to qualify for Access-A-Ride, they catch heat for being insensitive to the disabled community so they have no choice but to try to make this complicated and expensive system work.

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