When Kelly Mack orders a wheelchair-accessible Uber or Lyft, she does so knowing that most rides will cancel on her.
Even when Claire Stanley’s rideshare is accepted, some drivers pull up to the curb, see her guide dog and tell her they don’t want her in their car.
As members of D.C.’s disability community, both Mack and Stanley are accustomed to “abysmal” experiences getting a ride. But there is a potentially powerful newcomer in the market, one that has already divided disability advocates: Waymo.
A bill before the D.C. Council would allow companies to operate a fleet of up to 200 autonomous vehicles in the District. The bill, which received a hearing this month but won’t get a vote until the fall, has its supporters, including some disabled Washingtonians who are excited by the prospect.
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“There is just something very cool, as an adult who’s never been able to drive, that when you take an AV, you feel that freedom and that autonomy,” Stanley, an advocacy director at the American Council Of The Blind, told NOTUS.
But the bill doesn’t require operators to make their vehicles wheelchair-accessible, and that troubles wheelchair users, who say they have no reliable on-demand transportation service in the city.
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“We support the wider disability community getting their needs met, we just want to widen the scope of what [AV operators are] required to do to meet the needs of all of our community members,” said Heidi Case, a wheelchair user and disability advocate.
In theory, D.C. residents with disabilities can use the Metro system, for-hire vehicles or the city’s paratransit service to get around. But the bus and rail aren’t door-to-door services. Rideshare is only reliable in the heart of the city and sometimes refers riders out to taxi services, which struggle with driver shortages and have limited operating hours. City paratransit has to be booked at least a day in advance, and often has multiple stops.
“They either pick you up super early, or they get you there super late, or there’s multiple people on paratransit at the same time,” Stanley said. “So, what should be a 20-minute ride suddenly is an hourlong ride.”
Mack said she and her husband once had to show up at the airport a full day before their early-morning flight because paratransit couldn’t guarantee they’d have an accessible vehicle available for her to use. WMATA did not respond to a request for comment on how it plans to improve or expand its paratransit service.
The limited options are, in part, a product of policy. D.C. green-lit Uber and Lyft’s operations over a decade ago without mandating those companies provide accessible rides. That was a “big flaw” in that legislation, Jonathan Rogers, executive director of D.C.’s Department of For-Hire Vehicles, told NOTUS. He believes District leaders have an opportunity to do something different this time around.
“Instead of just hoping that they will prioritize those issues more than [companies] did when Uber and Lyft came here over a decade ago, let’s require it,” said Rogers.
At a hearing earlier this month, Waymo contended it can’t mandate what the automotive industry doesn’t manufacture. A Tesla spokesperson testified the company is trying to develop a “purpose-built wheelchair-accessible autonomous vehicle.”
“We are a technology company. We do not develop our own and manufacture our own vehicles,” testified Waymo spokesperson Matthew Walsh. “We have not been able to identify an electric vehicle platform that is fully wheelchair-accessible while also meeting the very unique specifications that we need to retrofit that vehicle with our technology.”
But D.C. requires taxi companies to make 20% of their fleet wheelchair-accessible. Those companies don’t employ drivers directly, and they also don’t own most of the fleet, Rogers said.
“It’s a little ironic,” he said. “It’s challenging to provide that service, but taxis are these tiny little small businesses, and they’re in the exact same position as these multinational corporations.”
Taxi companies complete about 96% of the city’s wheelchair-accessible rides, Rogers said. In 2025, taxis completed more than 166,000 wheelchair-accessible rides.
A spokesperson for Waymo told NOTUS the company is “actively assessing how we will provide an additional fleet of wheelchair accessible vehicles alongside our fully autonomous fleet,” should Waymo be allowed to operate here.
The company could do what it has done in some of the 11 cities where it operates: partner with local organizations to provide wheelchair-accessible vehicles — though with a human behind the wheel.
Private companies aren’t required by law to provide wheelchair-accessible cars, but they cannot discriminate against people with disabilities. A 2024 settlement in an ongoing disability discrimination lawsuit between the Equality Rights Center and Uber required the platform to incentivize drivers to provide wheelchair-accessible rides.
But D.C. advocates hope they will be given access to autonomous vehicles without getting tied up in court.
“I ask you to please require [Waymo] to do it,” Mack testified at the council hearing. “Otherwise, it’s putting the onus on my community to litigate.”
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