If you think catching a cab is hard, try spending a morning with Santa Perez, one of the founders of the disability advocacy group People First of Nevada. Perez, who has cerebral palsy, has difficulty speaking, and communicates thanks to an ingenious device that allows her to type Morse Code into a computer with her chin.

“The problem is that most of the cabs say they are able to serve people with disabilities, but [cabbies] are not properly trained,” she explains. “They don’t strap down wheelchairs. They rip off people who are blind. They don’t respect people with disabilities. I am afraid that until someone gets really hurt, the taxi authority will not listen.”

While cab companies might dispute that they’re not providing good service to the disabled, Tim Harney wouldn’t. Perez was just the kind of customer Harney had in mind when he and two partners started a new cab company called Handicab four years ago. But he has run into the very same problem Perez has identified—an authority that doesn’t seem to be listening. In this case, the Nevada Taxicab Authority, the state agency that regulates cabs in Clark County and slammed the door on Handicab’s efforts.

Harney’s idea was that his cabs would all be handicapped-accessible, and they would make serving the disabled community a priority. Both of Harney’s business partners have family members with disabilities, and Harney himself spent 20 years working in the Clark County School District and helped the district transition into ADA compliance.

“We took a look at it, the three of us, and said, ‘Let’s go for it.’” So Harney and his partners started Handicab. They traveled to Michigan and Minnesota and Florida to research alternatives to the “very slow, very expensive lifts” common in handicapped-accessible vehicles.

They commissioned UNLV professor Keith Schwer to study disabled access in 2005. “We didn’t come to this totally naïve. We found that anecdotally we could prove that there was a problem,” Harney says. Schwer concluded that 56.8 percent of respondents he surveyed thought that cab service in Vegas for the disabled was inadequate, and nearly 44 percent concluded the quality of service was not very good.

Handicab also tried to generate a wealth of anecdotal evidence by launching mytaxistory.com, which documented stories of bad service. The company claims people with disabilities tend to have fewer transit options. Sometimes calling a cab and waiting hours—if the cab comes at all—is the only option. “You and I are going to get bad service,” says Harney. “They are going to get service that is astoundingly bad.”

Handicab’s answer was to improve training for drivers—Harney wanted to hire Good Samaritans such as ex-teachers and ex-cops as drivers—and to disperse cabs throughout the city so they could respond to calls faster, rather than having them congregated around the Strip, Downtown and the airport. He also planned to beef up advertising and persuade disabled riders to make more trips during the middle of the week, when the volume of visitors to town is lowest.

But a service dedicated to the disabled was a nonstarter. Harvey says such a business model would have failed. There are, he says, 62 unrestricted cab licenses, or medallions, that “purportedly serve the handicapped. All of those have a right to pick up and deliver … any citizen.”

This would turn out to be a crucial decision. Handicab applied for 40 medallions two and a half years ago—this means that their cabs could go anywhere and provide service to anyone. And cab companies, not surprisingly, balked.

While Harney says there was opposition from the beginning, when the economy was better, by the time 2009 rolled around Handicab’s opponents had grown more vocal. The company was scheduled to appear before the Taxicab Authority at the end of April to determine whether it would be issued any medallions, but Handicab never made it that far. Instead, a consortium of cab companies filed a motion for summary judgment against Handicab—the argument essentially was that the transportation needs of the county were being met and didn’t require the issuance of any more licenses. Denying Handicab’s hearing would prevent the Authority and the cab companies from spending “hundreds of thousands more dollars in unnecessary fees and costs,” according to the motion.

In other words, the cab companies argued that Handicab wasn’t trying to get into the disabled cab business, but into the business of transporting anyone. Just like them.

The authority sided with the cab companies in denying Handicab its hearing. “Their finding was there’s no need for any new medallions … that material is not in dispute,” says Gordon Walker, administrator of the Authority.

Certainly, the Taxicab Authority does not issue many new medallions—it gets only a few requests a year. “The Taxicab Authority board has consistently over the last year not allocated any additional medallions, because the trips have been dropping,” Walker says. “That means there’s a negative impact on the drivers.” He notes the Authority hasn’t even been issuing extra medallions for conventions.

Right now, 16 companies operate 2,414 cabs in the Valley—62 of them are geared toward handicapped riders. Walker says cab trips are down this year versus last, although the decline seems to be slowing. Between January 2008 and January 2009, cab trips dropped 15 percent; in February, 12 percent; March, 10 percent; and in April, 8 percent. Those numbers seem to suggest cab rides are slowly moving back toward last year’s levels. Walker agrees that “we will be back to zero reduction in the next six months to a year, but I don’t see it by August or September.”

Harney thinks the cabs are doing fine. He says gross revenue per medallion has been holding steady in February, March and April, by comparison to last year’s figures—total rides per shift made be off slightly, but revenue per ride is up. He says lower gas prices this year over last means the cab companies are “doing fine. The idea that they’re in decline is embarrassing to them.”

But the question about the health of the existing cab companies obscures the more relevant question—the size of the disabled community in Las Vegas and the degree to which current companies are (or could be) meeting its needs. As Walker notes, only a quarter of one percent of 26 million cab rides in 2008—65,000 rides—were taken by disabled passengers. For cab companies, this suggests that the size of the disabled population is not very big.

“There’s definitely no need for 40 wheelchair vans when I can’t even put two more in service because of lack of calls,” Richard Flaven, president of Deluxe Taxicab Services, testified during the hearing. But others were more blunt. “This isn’t about being able to serve the handicap community ... but this is about 40 new cabs,” said John Moran, of Western Cab, in the proceedings.

Walker says there have been no complaints. “Before the Handicab application was filed, we had not received any service complaints on any handicapped or disabled passenger … The applicant generated a whole lot of supposed complaints in setting up their website. We have not seen but one in the year and three months I’ve been here.”

Cab companies are required to report the number of handicapped passengers they take, but reporting is spotty. And Walker’s numbers assume that aggrieved customers not only know how to make a complaint but also are inclined to do so.

The summary judgment order was signed May 12—Handicab has 30 days to appeal to the Nevada Transportation Authority, and then to District Court. Or, the company can wait 180 days and file a new application.

Walker says he may hold workshops or consider strengthening regulations for training drivers to handle the disabled. “I’m already aware of two companies that are taking very proactive steps to service this community of people,” says Walker.

But he sounds skeptical about whether this is truly an unmet need or just a need for better coordination of information. After all, the RTC runs a Paratransit service that provides a million rides a year, and the state’s Health and Human Services Department runs a program called Senior Rides, which also services the disabled. (It is funded by the authority to the tune of $500,000 a year.) Still, the Paratransit system has strict guidelines concerning who is eligible, and few people seem to know about Senior Rides.

Harney’s company has already spent $300,000. While he feels a return submission to the authority might be a waste of time, he is hoping an appeal to the Nevada Transportation Authority or beyond might result in a reversal of the “terrible legal error [that] has been made.”

Meanwhile, people like Perez try to keep their eyes on the long view. “Two things could happen,” she says. “The taxi authority could let us have Handicab with well-trained drivers who care and understand. Or all taxis drivers are trained by us.”