Obviously it costs uber far more to serve people in wheelchairs. So yes, making life better for parapalegics might make life worse (or at least more expensive) for blind people.
And here we have the double edge of regulation. It is not a very precise tool. Want a benefit for some group, but don’t want to have to, you know, actually pay for it? Easy! Just add a new regulation that makes all business owners pay for it! Voila, taxi regulations.
Imagine instead if the government simply gave disabled a stipend to help fund their transportation costs. A diverse market would emerge. Some businesses, eager to tap into the fountain of government stipends, would charge higher prices and offer wheelchair friendly vehicles. Other businesses would offer cheaper services, which would benefit groups like the blind. And not just the blind but single mothers, veterans, and even just regular ol’ people that want to go somewhere.
Regulations make taxis more expensive for everyone, including groups that deserve a break like the blind or the poor.
Stipends paid for by tax raises can be targeted at specific groups, like the very rich.
I have a lot of sympathy for the disabled and support policies that benefit them. But the existing regime of Taxi regulations of are extremely poorly thought out and inefficient.
Your sympathies for the physically challenged, however, are in the right place and I share them
PS: I'm not rich by any definition, just so you know that I'm not just advocating for my own "group"
Even better would be to make it cash instead of a stipend. Then you don't need a bureaucracy just to verify that the money is being spent on a particular thing, and if it turns out that the recipients prefer to use the money for something else instead, that only increases efficiency. People can choose the more efficient alternative between paying a premium for wheelchair-accessible transport or just having products delivered via UPS.
Or simplify things even further and just have a universal basic income to replace this sort of thing as well as the other thousands of other individual subsidies that end up producing mountains of unnecessary paperwork when we could just give everyone one unconditionally.
What I meant is that a regular taxi is obliged to serve a customer even in a more remote area of the city, while Uber can just ignore it. Similarly, taxi networks usually are obliged to have cars adapted to people with disabilities, which again increases their costs, but ensures there is service available for people with special need.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand, a big difference between old "Taxi mafia" and Uber is that the former will service people with disabilities, because they're forced to do so even if it's unprofitable by the same regulations that grant them semi-monopoly, while Uber will happily ignore this segment in its search for market efficiency.