Alex Graf is getting used to the idea that he’s no longer a punctual guy.
The rapid onset of a disorder affecting his spinal cord last summer forced the 36-year-old to transition from walking and running around his Takoma Park neighborhood to using a 400-pound powerchair. Now, Graf can expect to be late — late to work meetings, late to physical therapy appointments, late getting home to his wife and two toddlers.
“Being disabled is hard, but it’s mostly on other people,” he said. “You’re ceding the control of your own time, and you’re ceding it to people who don’t care, honestly. And not people, but systems.”
There’s one elevator at the Takoma Station Metro. Until last year, Graf could count on a reliable commute to Gallery Place each morning on the Red Line. Metro is still the best way to get around D.C., he said — indeed, the system is often lauded as one of the world’s most accessible for wheelchair users.
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“It is accessible when functional,” he said. “If that elevator goes down, you’re out of luck.”
When that happens, there’s no good solution. Either Graf tracks down the station manager and arranges for a Metro Access ride to the next closest station — which typically takes an hour — or he orders a wheelchair-accessible Uber (Lyft doesn’t offer accessible rides in D.C.).
“It’s barely a service,” he said of Uber. “The last 20 times I’ve tried to take rideshare, I’ve had five successful trips, which renders it useless. If you'[ve] got 25% odds of being able to go somewhere, you may not get there, but are you really going to chance it to get back?”
Those frustrations drove Graf and his wife, Nina, to testify before the D.C. Council on Monday on a bill that would require rideshare platforms to ensure wheelchair-accessible rides arrive in no more than 110% of the average wait for standard rides, ban drivers from refusing service to disabled people, and pay 10 cents per non-accessible ride for a fund that would purchase more wheelchair-accessible vehicles, or WAVs.
“Seeing his time not respected, and frankly, our kids having to wait on him, has been horrible. It’s just straight up unfair,” said Nina. “They need to make a change. I think this bill is a great step in the right direction.”
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Alex and Nina, who both work on health care policy issues, met in 2015 on OkCupid. The dating website rated them as an almost 100% compatibility match. They both attended the University of Wisconsin as undergraduates but had never met. They individually moved to D.C. more than a decade ago. After meeting and dating for three years, they moved to Takoma Park together in 2018 and got married the following year. They now have a 1-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old son.
Life is much the same for the couple as it was before Alex began using a wheelchair. They still have the same jobs, home, kids and commute. The same hobbies and interests.
“A lot of people say something along the lines of, ‘Man, I can’t imagine being you, having young kids and a disabled husband.’ It’s like, we have a lot of fun! We are adapting,” Nina said. “There’s things that are really hard, but we’re the same people. It’s not the disability itself, it’s the systems that are the most painful for us to adapt to.”
Take Monday, when the couple tried to access the Wilson Building to testify on the rideshare bill. Unable to scale the grand stairs at the building’s main entrance, Alex entered via a ramp at a side entrance. There, a security guard waved a wand over Alex’s powerchair to clear him for entry but told Nina she’d have to leave her husband and go through the main entrance.
“That’s a great example of just what it’s been like to adapt. We have to separate,” said Nina, striding toward the steps at the entrance.
She waited for him on the fifth floor, outside the hearing room.
“It just feels sad,” she said. “I just want to be with my husband.”
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Alex has lived in the D.C. area since 2012, but in the last year, he’s come to see it with new eyes. Or, perhaps, to see it for what it always was.
“I just had no idea any of this was a problem,” he said. “And then, you’re living it.”
He began sharing his frustrations on an Instagram page, but he wants to convert that anger into action. One of his ideas is to have Metro announce when an upcoming station has an elevator outage. WMATA tracks them online and supplies email updates, but those aren’t always up to date. Alex has been left stranded on the platform many times — particularly at Gallery Place, the station closest to his work, where multiple elevators need to be functioning in order for him to both cross the platform and exit. WMATA did not respond to a request for comment on whether it could implement such announcements.
His other idea: improve door-to-door wheelchair-accessible transit options including rideshare, taxicabs and city paratransit. As Alex discovered on Monday, plenty of people share his view.
He and Nina stopped at the Pret A Manger on F Street ahead of the 9:30 a.m. hearing to pick up coffees. They found three disabled women enjoying their beverages at a long, communal table — also gearing up to testify.
They swapped horror stories. One woman had waited for hours for Metro Access to pick her up after Sunday church service just the day before. Another, Heidi Case, encouraged Alex to give the council as much data as he could on how many rides had canceled on him.
“That is one of the big pushes in our testimony: data,” said Case. “It sells to government, and it creates lawsuits.”
It was fun to be around other people with disabilities, Alex said. Especially this group: smart, supportive, self-assured. When they reached the hearing room, Case had council aides clear a couple rows of chairs for them. They deserved to be up front. As the hearing got underway, and wheelchair users took the microphone to testify, Alex and Nina continued to swap looks, share nods, drop jaws. They weren’t alone.
When one person testified about the mental load of needing to constantly monitor web pages and apps for Metro elevator outages, they weren’t alone. When another laughed off Uber and Lyft’s arguments that they are technology, not transportation, companies, and so don’t need to offer accessible rides, they weren’t alone.
“How do you respond to industry concerns that it would not be possible to provide 100% equal service?” asked Ward 1 D.C. Council member Brianne Nadeau, who introduced the bill, to one group of people testifying.
“I would like to ask them, why? Because other places do, and I don’t think they’re in a different universe or have different financial systems or physics,” responded Kelly Mack, a wheelchair user and accessibility advocate.
“What do you think is an appropriate timeline for WAV compliance?” the council member asked.
“I kind of think 20 years ago?” Mack quipped.
They laughed; they weren’t alone.
When Alex testified, he led with the data. He talked about how in the parallel universe that was 15 months ago, he could easily get picked up by these same Ubers in three or four minutes. He could book rides ahead, which is an impossibility when requesting WAVs.
“We should not allow companies to operate in the District while offering one service to people who walk, and a lesser one to people who roll,” he testified. “These are some of the largest, most sophisticated companies in the world. They can solve this. They have done it in other cities, but only when they have been required to do so. Equal access is not a stretch goal. It should be the cost of doing business here.”
Representatives from both Uber and Lyft testified opposing the bill. Their primary argument is that since drivers are contractors with their own vehicles, the companies can’t be responsible for a lack of WAV service. Instead, the city should work on increasing its supply of WAVs and then contract with their platforms. Waymo and other autonomous vehicle companies made a similar argument in a recent public hearing.
“There needs to be better WAV access; we don’t believe this bill does it,” Briana Gilmore, Uber’s head of global accessibility policy, told The Washington Sun.
If D.C. modernized its taxicabs’ payment platforms, Uber could contract with wheelchair-accessible cabs, Gilmore said. Since 20% of the city’s cab fleets have to be accessible by law, taxis currently offer the most WAVs. The city could also allow paratransit to contract with rideshare services, Gilmore added.
The bill proposes charging rideshare companies 10 cents per non-accessible ride to fund the development of more WAVs. Uber sent emails to customers Tuesday saying that any fee could be passed on to them directly, according to an email reviewed by a Sun reporter.
“The bill would penalize platforms for trips no accessible vehicle is available to take, which won’t add a single WAV to the road. Instead, we should better study the current WAV landscape in the District to best understand riders’ accessibility needs and how providers can better meet them,” a Lyft spokesperson said in a statement shared with The Sun.
Advocates, on the other hand, want to strengthen the bill and even increase that fee. Nina pushed for real enforcement — something that would ensure disabled riders get picked up quickly and are not discriminated against — and a timeline to roll these initiatives out.
Until then, she and Alex will be waiting.
“In July, Alex waited two hours for an Uber to get home from work. [My son] asked when his dad would finally be home. I explained his dad was still waiting for a ride home, and my son asked why,” she said, in testimony that moved Nadeau to tears. “How do you explain discrimination and that level of unfairness to my 3-year-old?”
The kids miss their dad when he has to go through separate security screenings or building entrances, or when he comes home late, but ultimately, Nina said, the chair doesn’t make much of a difference to them. They ride in Alex’s lap to day care each morning. Last Halloween, just a couple months after Alex began using his powerchair, their 3-year-old dressed as a wheelchair-accessible van to go trick-or-treating — a cardboard box with a wheelchair symbol and Maryland plates.
“You see things from the perspective of kids, and it really changes you, too. Kids adapt,” Nina said. “They see joy.”
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