David Tatel and his wife had just left a discussion of blindness in the Torah. He was headed from a Cleveland Park synagogue to the U.S. Court of Appeals in D.C., where he serves as a senior judge. But as soon as he got into his Lyft, the driver got out and began shouting that he would not take Tatel’s guide dog.
“He went totally nuts; he screamed at us,” Tatel recalled of being berated with his German shepherd, Vixen. “You would have thought we were asking him to carry plutonium.”
Refusing to accommodate service dogs is a violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act, as well as the D.C. Human Rights Act, as Tatel’s wife tried to explain to the driver. Tatel knows those laws well — in his three decades on one of the most influential appeals courts in the nation, he has written opinions on discrimination impacting institutions from D.C. public schools to the U.S. Foreign Service. But in the moment, he said, he felt as anyone would being shouted at on the street and refused service.
“It’s embarrassing; it’s humiliating to be rejected for something because you’re blind,” he said. “I’ve been blind a long time; I’ve had a lot of experiences. This was like nothing else.”
Such incidents, however, are not uncommon, according to the National Federation of the Blind (NFB). Six years ago, both Lyft and Uber settled lawsuits brought by the organization, making commitments to stop working with drivers who have refused to transport service dogs and to investigate claims of discrimination. (Individual suits against the companies are stymied by terms of service that require riders to settle complaints through arbitration.)
Both agreements ended after three years with unclear impact because only Uber provided data and only during the litigation. In 2019, the company counted 5,460 complaints of service animal discrimination, saying that represented an 11 percent decline from 2017.
The NFB has collected its own data indicating denials have increased but acknowledges these voluntary surveys are incomplete.
“We’re all frustrated; we haven’t gotten to where we need to be,” National Federation of the Blind President Mark Riccobono said. The group wants “internal reporting, tracking of data and some transparency to the community about the data.”
In 2021, Uber introduced a new service called UberPet that costs about $5 extra; blind riders say it has made the problem worse because drivers will insist they use that service. (Both Uber and Lyft say their policy is that riders with guide dogs do not have to use UberPet.)
“I’m constantly having to say this is not a pet, this is not a chihuahua — this is a service dog,” said Karen Petrou, a financial policy analyst who travels often for work.
Uber says it has a zero-tolerance policy for “confirmed instances” that a driver knowingly refused to take a service animal.
Lyft says it parts ways with drivers who “knowingly” violate the policy after one confirmed or two alleged incidents. Both say in their policies that “allergies, religious objections, or a generalized fear of animals” are not valid reasons to refuse riders with service animals.
In the NFB litigation, Uber said that few drivers are repeat offenders, indicating proper enforcement. The NFB said that was more likely a reflection of how rare it would be for a driver to be matched with multiple service dog users.
But both companies maintain that they are not legally responsible for compliance with the law because they are not providing transportation, just technology connecting individual drivers and riders.
Riccobono said that “every court which has considered the question has determined that these companies are subject to the Americans With Disabilities Act.”
One such ruling was written in 2021 by Tatel’s former colleague Ketanji Brown Jackson, who now sits on the U.S. Supreme Court, in a lawsuit against Uber over wheelchair accessibility.
New litigation is possible. Advocacy groups have encouraged reporting incidents to the Justice Department, which has sued both Uber and Lyft over treatment of people with disabilities in the past.
Liz Bottner has been dutifully reporting her denied rides — 36 since September, including both an Uber and a Lyft on Christmas Eve.
The agency responded each time by email that they “unfortunately do not have the resources to take direct action” for that report.
“I don’t know what the magic number is that they’ll decide it’s an issue,” Bottner said.
Olivia Norman says that after years of rejection she has given up and started using more expensive private car services.
“I refuse to spend my money on companies that discriminate against me,” she said. Her last bad experience was in January, when she was trying to get across D.C. for a brunch celebrating her new job at the Department of Veterans Affairs. She says the driver saw her, shouted that he didn’t take pets and drove off.
“It turns good moments into angry moments,” she said.
Taxis are regulated by city agencies and can be penalized for discrimination. But unlike cabs speeding away, cancellations by ride-share drivers are logged online.
“These companies have some pretty powerful technology,” Riccobono said. “We need them to use that technology to make recording and reporting of these incidents faster and easier, and connect blind people to resources if they are stranded.”
Sometimes those records become their own problem. Blind passengers have had to fight fees claiming they never showed up; during the pandemic several people said they were falsely flagged as refusing to wear a mask. Petrou said that after a recent trip to the Cosmos Club where a “terrible driver” resisted taking her guide dog, Lyft warned her she had been reported as a rude passenger. To get that off her record, she had to call and complain.
“I could be cut off from the service,” she said.
Moira Shea, who was the first congressional aide to bring a guide dog on the Senate floor, said that early in the pandemic a driver falsely told Uber that she was not wearing a mask; after that she began taking pictures of herself before getting in cars. She’s fought the company over multiple alleged violations.
“There are some people who don’t like blind people, who don’t like women and don’t like dogs,” she said. “When you get in a car with someone like that, it’s trouble.”
Uber said the company “investigates every report of a service animal denial and takes appropriate action” on “a case-by-case basis.” Until April 2022, riders reported for not wearing masks were required to take a masked selfie before riding again; Uber said “no action was taken” to limit Shea’s ability to use the app.
The NFB suggested improvements to Uber as the settlement was expiring, including better education for drivers, translating the policy into different languages, and rewards for compliance. But Uber was not required to adopt those ideas.
“Plaintiffs do not allege that Uber failed to comply with the terms of the Settlement,” a federal judge in California wrote, ‘but simply complain that service animal discrimination remains pervasive.”
This story has been updated to clarify Tatel’s encounter with the Lyft driver.