Taxi company admits to 'dropping the ball' after Coquitlam senior's 3-hour wait for accessible cab

Bel-Air Taxi has apologized and admittedto mishandling a call on Canada Day that saw a wheelchair-bound senior in Coquitlam, B.C., wait several hours in the rain for an accessible cab.

Merle Smith, 70, says she called a taxi around 8:30 p.m. PT and was told one would arrive within 15 to 20 minutes. Three hours and multiple callbacks later, she was still waiting.

"We dropped the ball, it was our fault," said Sean Bowden, general manager of Bel-Air Taxi.

Most calls go through a computer system, he explained, but wheelchair accessible cabs are dispatched manually.

In this case, he said, a mistake was made in how the call was assigned.

"We mishandled it on the dispatching side," Bowden told Michelle Eliot, guest host of CBC's The Early Edition.

"We are going over the whole situation with our dispatch as well as with our call-taking staff."

Calls for more accessible cabs

But Smith a disability rights advocate since she become quadriplegic at age 14 says the problem runs deeper than that.

She is calling for more accessible taxis, saying that the current numbers don't meet the needs of people with disabilities.

Fifteen per cent of taxis in Coquitlam are required to be accessible, something Bowden says Bel-Air complies with.

The company has 19 wheelchair-accessible taxis and 16 of them were in service on Canada Day.

"This wasn't because of the number of vehicles on the road," he said. "We had the resources out there but we actually mishandled it."

Coquitlam Mayor Richard Stewart waited with Smith for a portion of the evening and took to social media, calling the wait unacceptable.

He later reached out to the taxi company and plans to pursue the incident.

"We will be having a discussion this week and I want council to actually invite them into a more formal process to find out why their business licence is appropriate in Coquitlam," he told CBC on Tuesday.

"I want us to do everything we can to get them to understand how severe, how completely unacceptable this situation is."

With files from The Early Edition.

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