Gov. Hochul is deploying 750 members of the Guard and 250 state and MTA police officers to subway stations to inspect passengers’ bags following a spate of violent incidents across the system.

“No one heading to their job or to visit family or to go to a doctor’s appointment should worry that the person sitting next to them possesses a deadly weapon,” Hochul said Wednesday beside MTA Chairman Janno Lieber in front of a giant system map at the MTA’s Rail Control Center.

“They shouldn’t worry about whether someone’s going to brandish a knife or a gun.”

The random checks will fall well short of the body scans and pat downs of airport-level security. Straphangers are already familiar with how this will work — cops at tables performing random bag checks have appeared at subway turnstiles from time to time in the 22 years since the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Transit officials said the state support would simply allow for more such spot checks throughout the system, and that the National Guard, MTA police or other state law enforcement won’t be patrolling the trains.

The additional law enforcement power is one of a slate of state actions Hochul hopes will reduce crime underground — a “five-point plan [to] rid our subways of violent offenders and protect all commuters and transit workers,” as she put it.

“I am sending a message to all New Yorkers — I will not stop working to keep you safe and restore your peace of mind whenever you walk through those turnstiles,” she said

Besides the bag checks, the five initiatives include a $20 million plan to beef up the number of clinical teams responding to people in mental distress on subways from two to 10 systemwide.

Another of Hochul’s five initiatives is her support for the MTA’s plan to install surveillance cameras inside conductor and train-operator cabs. That initiative is a direct response to the slashing of MTA conductor Alton Scott, who narrowly survived a random assault last week when he stuck his head out of his cab as his train stopped at a Brooklyn subway station.

“If a camera had been positioned in Alton Scott’s conductor cabin last Thursday, we probably would have already apprehended the person who slashed his neck,” Hochul said.

“Today I’m directing the MTA to install cameras in every single conductor cabin, as well as [on] platforms that face the cabins,” she added.

No platform-mounted camera caught Scott’s attacker last week either.

MTA officials have stated that the station had multiple working surveillance cameras, but none were pointed at the conductor’s mid-platform position when Scott’s late-night A train pulled into the Rockaway Ave. station in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Transit brass declined to comment Wednesday on how many other stations might need upgrades to their camera coverage, citing security concerns.

Transport Workers Union Local 100 has long opposed putting cameras in conductor and operator cabs, citing privacy concerns. The MTA said last week it will install the cameras anyway.

A Local 100 spokesman said Wednesday that the union will support the installation so long as the cameras are solely for safety purposes, and are not used to support disciplinary cases against union members.

Hochul’s fourth initiative is proposed legislation to ban anyone convicted of an assault on transit from the system for three years. Currently the law allows a ban only on those who are convicted of assaulting a transit worker.

Her fifth initiative is improved coordination between MTA officials and district attorneys and police. That initiative will include regular meetings to discuss subway crime, the first of which is scheduled for next week.

As part of that fifth initiative, Hochul said, the MTA will hire a new “criminal justice advocate to assist the victims of crime in the system,” and develop a system to “flag recidivist offenders” to district attorneys.

NYPD brass and MTA leaders blame the uptick in crime on repeat offenders.

“One percent of subway arrestees, according to the NYPD, are responsible for well over 20% of the crime,” MTA boss Lieber said. “We need to have a collaboration with the [district attorneys] so they have that full information.”

The NYPD is fighting a 15.5% jump in felony assaults at city subway stops and trains.

Police have counted 97 such assaults in the subway system this year as of Sunday, 13 more than in the same period of 2023.

Misdemeanor assaults — slaps, punches and other relatively minor attacks — are down 3.9% for the year, with 249 misdemeanor assaults as of Sunday, 10 fewer than the 259 that had occurred by this time last year.

NYPD brass has said grand larcenies — property theft and pickpocketing — are the main thing pushing crime rates up in the subway system. Those crimes are up 17.8%, from 163 reported incidents last year to 192 this year.

There have been three homicides on the transit system so far this year, up from one this time last year.

The most recent was two weeks ago, when a man was fatally shot two weeks ago while on board a southbound B train in the Bronx.

On Tuesday, police arrested a man for allegedly stabbing a passenger onboard an uptown A train in what cops described as a hate crime.

Arrests in the system are up 45% over last year, according to police, with 3,261 arrests so far as of Sunday, up from 2,243 last year.

Earlier Wednesday, Mayor Adams — who did not join Hochul at her announcement — said NYPD officers will also be increasing bag checks in the subway system.

Neither the mayor nor transit officials would say at which stations the ramped-up bag checks will take place. An Adams administration spokesperson said there will be 94 NYPD bag screening teams deployed to 136 stations each week.

“They’re going to be a seven-day-a-week operation,” NYPD Transit Chief Michael Kemper said in a Wednesday morning appearance with Adams on CBS New York.

Adams said the checks will be “random” and that the Police Department won’t engage in any “profiling.”

“People who don’t want their bags checked can turn around and not enter the system,” he said.

The governor’s plan to put National Guard soldiers in the subway system was met with alarm from civil libertarians.

“This plan is whiplash inducing. The city only recently trumpeted safety data,” Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.

“These heavy-handed approaches will, like stop-and-frisk, be used to accost and profile Black and Brown New Yorkers, ripping a page straight out of the Giuliani playbook,” she said, comparing Hochul to the former Republican mayor.

Albert Fox Cahn, head of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, expressed specific concern about the use of the National Guard.

“We shouldn’t militarize the MTA when crime rates are falling and budgets are contracting,” he said in a statement.

“I fear how many New Yorkers will be wrongly arrested or hurt before we recognize that soldiers have no place on the streets of democracy.”

Twenty-one students from the Bronx Design and Construction Academy, a vocational school in the South Bronx, rode the Metro-North Railroad to Grand Central to meet with some of the tradespeople that work on the 111-year-old building.

The visiting students are studying for certifications in heating, ventilation and air conditioning — HVAC — or in one of the electrical trades, said Orvil Boatswain, an HVAC instructor at the school. They were hoping to see how their trades are plied at Grand Central.

“We’re going down to the Track 100 shops,” Brian Phillips, the railroad’s deputy director for track repair, told the students as they stood under the painted constellations of the terminal’s main concourse.

The rooms along Track 100, Phillips explained, housed many of the workshops that keep Grand Central humming: locksmiths, machinists, metal shops, HVAC — “basically all your trades you need to keep this beautiful place functioning.”

After a brief safety briefing, the students split into smaller groups.

HVAC hopefuls headed to the sheet-metal shop where duct-work is made, while the electrically-minded headed down beneath the terminal to the service plant, where water and high pressure steam are sent around the building.

“The electrical field — if you love this craft, it will take care of you,” said Severin Smith, Grand Central’s superintendent of electrical and mechanical maintenance, speaking over the din of water pumps and other machinery. “Don’t worry about the money, learn the craft.”

“What would you like to do?” Smith asked the students

“Signals,” said one student.

“You’ll work with Metro North!” Smith replied. “We need guys like you. Please, work with us.”

“Elevator repair,” said 17-year-old Daniel Santiago.

“You’re going to make a ton of money,” Smith told Santiago with a smile. “But it’s hard work. It’s not easy.”

Santiago said the challenge of working on a powerful machine tasked with moving people safely appealed to him. “And you wont run out of places where you have an elevator or an escalator,” he said.

As the students climbed out of the pump room and back up towards the tracks, Boatswain, the instructor, recognized an old student, currently employed in Grand Central’s machine shop. The two men embraced.

Back under the fiber-optic stars dotting the ceiling of the station’s main concourse, MTA chairman Janno Lieber spoke with the students.

Calling the century-old terminal “the capital of mass transit in the United States,” he asked them to consider “serving [their] neighbors” by coming to work for the MTA.

“We all know New York kids are curious about the system,” Lieber said. “The natural reservoir of talent for us is kids who grew up in New York and know our system. It means something to them.”

The East Side thoroughfare is home to one of the busiest on-street bike lanes in the city, as well as the city’s busiest bus route, the M15.

“Our proposed redesign of Second Avenue would make commutes faster and more reliable for 57,000 daily bus riders, better protect the increasing number of cyclists, and improve safety for all road users,” Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez said in a statement.

The city’s design — which would affect the avenue from E. 59th St. to Houston St.— is still not finalized, and was slated to be presented to Manhattan’s Community Board 6 on Monday evening.

But DOT officials told the Daily News that they hoped to move the Second Ave. bus lane away from the curb where it currently runs and bring it closer to the center of the street.

The so-called “offset” bus lane would allow the city to prioritize buses around the clock without having to compete with commercial vehicles loading or unloading curbside. Currently, the curbside bus lane is only in effect from 7 a.m. until 10 a.m. during the morning and from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m. in the afternoon.

NYC Transit President Rich Davey praised the plan.

“I applaud the DOT’s proposal on behalf of 57,000 daily riders on the M15, the busiest bus route in the city,” Davey said in a Monday statement.

“Along with traffic reduction from congestion pricing, shifting the bus lane away from the curb and making it active 24/7 will shorten wait times and bring faster service — our customers’ top requests for increased bus satisfaction,” he added. “It will work here, and anywhere else it may be proposed.”

The DOT’s proposal would also widen the Second Ave. bike lane from 6 feet to at least 8 feet — and up to 10 feet in some sections.

As in previous bike lane overhauls, DOT officials said the wider lanes should allow faster cyclists or e-bike riders to pass slower bike traffic without needing to veer into car traffic.

Pending community feedback, transportation officials said they hope to begin work on the project before the end of the year.

The news was quietly announced in the TLC’s annual report on the state of the city’s for-hire vehicle industry, published late Friday.

“Based on [the TLC’s] analysis, the pending litigation concerning TLC’s decision to issue EV-restricted licenses under the previous License Review, and the need to evaluate the impact of new licenses before determining whether any additional licenses should be made available,” the report continues, “TLC finds that additional for-hire vehicle licenses are not needed at this time.”

Last fall’s run on the coveted TLC license plates, which are required to accept app-based hails, came after the New York Taxi Worker’s Alliance sued to stop the Adams administration from modifying the 2018-era cap on for-hire vehicles to allow an unlimited number of Ubers and Lyfts, so long as they were electric. The plan was part of the Mayor’s so-called Green Rides initiative, meant to make the entire fleet electric by 2030.

The Taxi Workers Alliance argued that the TLC didn’t have the legal authority to unilaterally change the license plate cap rules, and that a slew of new vehicles with TLC plates would saturate the market, hurting existing ride-share and yellow taxicab drivers.

In response, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Machelle Sweeting in November ordered a temporary stop to the new licenses. At the time, Sweeting granted a five-day grace period for those who may have already purchased an electric car. By its end, 9,756 applications had been filed to the TLC.

As previously reported by the Daily News, the new electric cars have pushed the total number of electric Ubers and Lyfts citywide to more than 10,000, or roughly 12% of the fleet.

“The rush for licenses brought about by the lawsuit resulted in a much more rapid expansion of EVs in the [for-hire] fleet than TLC had anticipated,” the agency acknowledged in Friday’s report.

The TLC’s report was widely read as a signal that no new EV plates would be issued even if the agency prevailed against the Taxi Worker Alliance’s lawsuit in court. TLC officials did not say Monday when or if additional EV license plates would again be available.

“We’re two years ahead of schedule in our Green Rides initiative,” TLC commissioner David Do said Monday at an event celebrating the opening of a new-technology EV charging hub in midtown.

The plan had initially required 5% of all app-based hails to be served by electric or wheelchair-accessible vehicles by the end of this year. The TLC now seems poised to soon meet its December 2025 goal of converting 15% of all rides to electric or accessible vehicles.

In October, when first announcing the plan alongside Mayor Adams, Do had emphasized the TLC’s desire to build the EV fleet slowly, in part to keep the city’s charging infrastructure from being outpaced.

Monday, at the opening of a 24-port, 500kW charging hub run by New York-based firm Gravity, Do praised innovation in charging.

“Moving forward, we need more facilities like this one,” he said of the facility.

The charging hub, Gravity’s first open to the public, is capable of providing up to 200 miles of range in as little as 5 minutes, depending on an EV’s battery, CEO Moshe Cohen said.

“This initiative was meant to spur more electric vehicle infrastructure,” Do said of the city’s EV push, “and it has done just that.”

Pay records obtained by the Daily News show the MTA has paid out at least $4.1 million in overtime over the past 52 weeks to maintain a round-the-clock fire watch at the facility.

At least three MTA workers involved in the fire watch have made more than triple their base salary, according to the records, pulling overtime on foot patrols of the facility while searching for signs of fire.

Meanwhile, efforts to repair 2,000 feet of underground eight-inch pipe feeding the sprinkler system continue to fall flat, with the system repeatedly failing to hold more than half the water pressure required by code.

The system, which is supposed to provide fire-quenching capabilities to the massive facility — home to about 250 buses as well as maintenance, repair and tire shops, and MTA offices — has been on the fritz for years, sources at the depot tell The News.

But crews have repeatedly failed to properly repair or replace the subterranean pipe that sends water from the city’s main to thousands of sprinkler heads across 19 different portions of the four-story bus depot.

A 21-year-old RTS-06 bus pulls into the East New York bus depot in March 2019. (Photo by Clayton Gus

The trouble began in the fall on 2021, sources tell The News, when a portion of the pipe ruptured under the floor of the facility’s bus wash, near the corner of Bushwick Ave. and Fanchon Place.

Work crews made a repair to the pipe, but it was unable to hold high pressure.

When the pipe ruptured again in July 2022, eight feet beneath a storeroom on the first floor, costs started mounting.

Around the time of that leak, sources say, the MTA started paying bus depot workers overtime to walk the massive facility in a round-the-clock fire watch — a requirement under fire code when the sprinkler or alarm system is offline.

The water line was dug up and patched, but it burst again under the storeroom a few months later.

Another leak sprung under the storeroom last year.

When The News first reported on the growing cost of fire watch overtime last August, MTA officials said a solution could be expected soon.

Agency spokesmen said the pipe would be lined with epoxy in an effort to strengthen it, and NYC Transit President Rich Davey told FOX 5 News last August that his crews were “probably within weeks of fixing it.”

But by December the epoxy plan had been scrapped, and another rupture occurred with the burst pipe flooding the depot’s boiler room.

“The [water] line is so corroded that it’s just breaking in different areas,” one source at the depot told The News. “The line has seen its day.”

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At no point in the more-than-two-year leak hunt, sources say, has the pipe passed the required pressure test by holding 200 pounds per square inch for two hours.

MTA pay records obtained by The News show only the workers making more than the a pay cap of $183,376 set out in their  union contract. The $183,376 cap is for their total earnings — their base salaries, plus overtime. Workers making more than $183,376 are flagged by their departments.

It is unclear how many workers in total are tasked with fire watch at the depot, as well as why the nearly three dozen employees on the overtime list obtained by The News continue to be paid in excess of the cap.

Of the nearly three dozen transit employees on the overtime list, two electricians and one shop mechanic have made more than triple their $83,200 yearly base salary. One electrician has earned $254,973 in the past 52 weeks, and the other electrician has made $259,773. The shop mechanic has made $259,244.

The $4.1 million total paid out in overtime documented by The News does not include workers who may have worked on the fire watch but whose total earnings are below the $183,376 pay cap.

MTA officials have acknowledged the need for a more permanent solution.

Agency spokesman Mike Cortez told The News in February that money had been set aside for an eventual total replacement of the sprinkler system.

But last week, transit officials said a sprinkler system replacement would be part of a full overhaul of the depot — which may now be delayed due to legal battles over congestion pricing.

“Those permanent improvements are on hold until congestion pricing is resolved,” Davey told reporters of a full overhaul.

But Davey said a wholesale replacement of the system wasn’t immediately necessary.

“We’ve been working very hard to shore up that system, stabilize it — I think we’re very very close, we’ve had some challenges, it’s an old system,” he said.

“It’s taken more time, I think, than we would all like, but we’re pretty close,” he continued. “We’ve been chasing leaks in the system and continue to plug them.”

“On every single day, 2,300 firefighters go to work in New York City,” Uniformed Firefighters Association president Andrew Ansbro said at a public comment session held at MTA headquarters. “When they get to their firehouse, they may be reassigned to another firehouse based on staffing needs — it happens probably a couple hundred times a day.”

Those firefighters then use their personal vehicles to move up to 80 pounds of equipment to their assigned location, Ansbro added.

“Our members would be crossing in and out of the congestion zone as they go from one firehouse to the next,” he said.

Ansbro was one of several firefighters who addressed the MTA at the second of four public comment sessions aimed at refining the agency’s plan to charge motorists under the state’s congestion pricing plan.

The current version of the plan would see a base toll of $15 levied once a day on cars and other small vehicles entering Manhattan at 60th St. and below.

That fee would be an unfair burden on firefighters who don’t know where they and their equipment would be needed each day, Ansbro argued.

“I don’t think anyone here thinks it’s safe for a New York City firefighter to carry that bag from the firehouse down to the subway, in the subway, up and out — an hour-and-a-half Crossfit session — and then show up at a firehouse and be expected to fight a fire at full capacity,” he said.

“The best tool on a fire truck is a well-rested firefighter.”

Jim Brosi, head of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association, agreed.

“This is a very unique department that has some very stringent requirements on how we transport personal protective gear,” he said. “We are required to use our personal car or public transportation.

“It is unrealistic that we should be expected to walk several city blocks before traveling two, three or four flights down below grade,” Brosi continued. “To then come back out of that hole and then be asked to perform firefighting duties immediately upon arrival at a firehouse is unrealistic.”

The MTA — along with the Traffic Mobility Review Board, the body that suggested the current tolling plan — has generally pushed back against requests for exemptions by public servants and others commuting by car.

But MTA chair Janno Lieber said Friday he was “sympathetic” to the firefighters’ arguments.

“They’re not asking for special treatment because they commute with their cars,” Lieber told reporters. “When they’re called upon to actually turn their personal vehicle into a city vehicle for the transportation of gear, that ought to be thought through.”

Still, Lieber stopped short of backing an exemption, saying the city should bear the cost instead of smoke-eaters themselves.

“We’re still in discussions with the city about [municipal] work vehicles and how to define them,” Lieber said.

“I think this is a classic situation where the employer is asking an employee to turn [a] personal vehicle into a work vehicle,” he said. “Normally, when an employer says you’ve got to travel a certain way to carry equipment or to carry material, they compensate you for the cost of that.”

Congestion pricing is expected to raise $1 billion per year in revenue towards the MTA’s capital budget.

The controversial policy is on schedule to be put into effect in June, pending legal challenges from the state of New Jersey and several groups of New York City residents.

The MTA said 72 people spoke at Friday’s hearing. Counting the 89 people who spoke at the first congestion pricing, the MTA said, it had heard from a total of 161 speakers about the issue. Two more hearings are planned, both on Monday.

Construction of the bike lane and related traffic-calming measures along Underhill Ave. — a nine-block residential stretch that includes an elementary school, a playground, and a parking garage — was halted in October when Adams said “long-term residents” hadn’t been given enough input.

An additional round of public outreach took place shortly after, but the project remained in limbo for months without word from Adams administration officials.

That changed Wednesday, when Department of Transportation officials said work on the largely-finished redesign would resume overnight.

“Following a thorough community engagement process, it is clear the community strongly supports this work on Underhill Avenue, which will better protect everyone on the corridor,” DOT spokesman Vincent Barone told the Daily News.

A 2021 DOT survey of 1,500 nearby residents found that 86% wanted a permanent street redesign for Underhill and nearby Vanderbilt Ave.

Wednesday’s announcement comes days after reporting by Streetsblog that some area residents had apparently taken it upon themselves to complete the project, installing planters and other traffic obstructions ahead of DOT crews.

Barone confirmed that the project is close to completion — crews are expected to paint new double-yellow and double-white lines in the coming days, as well as adding green paint and stenciling to the protected bike lanes.

In the spring, the DOT expects to finish marking one final traffic-diverting section on the avenue, which stretches from Eastern Parkway near the Brooklyn Public Library northward to Atlantic Ave.

The plan aims to slow car traffic on Underhill Ave. by making some sections one-way and placing traffic diverters and planters on the street while installing sections of protected bike lane between the sidewalk and parked cars.

The plan also removes a parking space from in front of the entrance to James Forten Playground and from street corners along the road in an effort to improve visibility.

Opponents of the plan have argued that the shift to one-way traffic and the installation of obstructions like planters make it difficult for emergency vehicles to travel on Underhill Ave., and that the loss of parking spaces affects neighborhood residents as well as teachers at nearby P.S. 9.

DOT officials declined Wednesday to make the results of the second round of community outreach available to The News, but said the survey had included door-to-door outreach and an online survey in addition to setting up tables for discussion throughout the neighborhood.

Tolling cameras have been installed at 104 of 110 locations — roughly 95% of the planned tolling points — said Allison de Cerreño, MTA’s chief operating officer for bridges and tunnels.

“We just had another one completed this morning,” de Cerreño said at a meeting of the MTA board. “The remaining sites are being worked on as I speak here today.”

The near-complete installation of the vehicle toll collection infrastructure means that the MTA can begin testing the system. Officials said the tolling network should be ready to turn on in advance of an expected June ruling in one of several federal lawsuits aimed at stopping the plan.

That suit, brought by the administration of New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, alleges that the U. S. Transportation Department and the Federal Highway Administration failed to conduct a “comprehensive” and “complete” environmental review of New York’s congestion pricing plan, which New Jersey claims will cause pollution by changing regional traffic patterns.

MTA officials say traffic patterns were exhaustively studied, and steps will be taken to mitigate pollution where truck traffic may increase.

One other suit in New Jersey federal court and three in New York federal courts challenge the program along similar lines of argument. Oral arguments are scheduled in the Murphy case on April 3. A ruling is expected in June ahead of a stated June 15 launch date for the congestion pricing system.

MTA officials say the lawsuits have already delayed some of their plans for bus, subway and train infrastructure upgrades and fixes.

The congestion pricing tolling devices are installed along the congestion zone’s northern border at 60th Street, as well as at bridge and tunnel exits further south.

The cameras are also installed along the FDR Drive and the West Side Highway, both of which are excluded from the congestion toll.

The devices are designed to work much like the cashless tolling systems already in place at the region’s bridges and tunnels.

As a vehicle approaches a tolling device, it will photograph the front license plate. If the vehicle has an E-ZPass tag, the tolling system will log the E-ZPass tag number as well, before photographing the vehicle’s rear plate as it drives past.

The camera system will use infrared illumination to reduce light pollution, de Cerreño said.

The system will also classify the vehicle into one of five tolling categories based on its shape and size.

“The system’s going to use advanced technology that focuses on vehicle characteristics such as shape and other distinguishing features to determine which class a vehicle fits into,” de Cerreño said.

The cameras are also expected to use a form of machine learning to classify vehicles into tolling categories. “The more vehicles the system sees, the better it gets at classifying them,” de Cerreño said.

Under the current proposal, cars, SUVs and pickup trucks entering Manhattan at 60th St. or below would be charged a base rate of $15 an hour, with discounts for nighttime drivers or those who entered via a tolled crossing.

That rate climbs higher for larger vehicles such as box trucks, tractor-trailers, and buses.

Public hearings on the plan begin Wednesday at MTA headquarters in lower Manhattan.

Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez rallied with advocates and local elected officials Thursday in support of a bill that would reup the program and allow the city to expand it to more intersections.

“Each year there are unfortunately far too many fatalities involving red-light running,” Rodriguez said. “In 2023, 29 people were killed in red-light-running crashes. That’s the worst annual total we have recorded.”

Each of those fatal crashes took place at an intersection without a red-light camera, Rodriguez added.

“We have the tools to prevent this,” he said. “We know what works.”

“If we don’t act this year, our red-light camera program will expire right as we are seeing troubling numbers for red-light-running deaths,” Rodriguez said.

State law currently limits New York City to 150 red-light cameras across the five boroughs, an authorization that is set to expire at the end of the year.

A bill currently before the state Legislature would reauthorize the cameras through 2030 and expand the program to 1,325 intersections — about 10% of the roughly 13,700 intersections with traffic signals citywide.

DOT officials say the program reduces red-light recidivism. According to the department’s data, 94% of drivers caught running reds by camera rack up two or fewer violations.

“Who wants to defend peoples’ right to run red lights without being penalized?” asked state Sen. Michael Gianaris (D-Queens), sponsor of a bill that would suspend the registration of any vehicle caught running five red lights in 12 months.

“Nobody,” he said.

Thursday’s rally was held at the intersection of Second Ave. and E. 97th St. on the border of East Harlem and the Upper East Side, where delivery worker Ernesto Guzman was killed in 2020 by a driver who ran a red.

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Fellow deliverista Sergio Solano spoke at the rally, calling on lawmakers to expand the camera program.

“I spoke with [Guzman’s] family last night,” Solano said. “They’re still waiting for justice.”

“That’s why I’m here today,” he said. “Thank you for these cameras — maybe they’ll work for other people.”

The filing in Manhattan Federal Court on Wednesday by Taxis For All and several other advocates alleges that the TLC is in breach of a 2013 agreement reached to settle a lawsuit over taxi accessibility.

The agreement, approved by Manhattan Federal Judge George Daniels in 2014, required the TLC to make certain 50% of the city’s 13,587 yellow cabs were wheelchair accessible by 2020.

At the time of the agreement, more than 98% of the city’s yellow cabs were inaccessible to wheelchair-using passengers. Daniels called the settlement “one of the most significant acts of inclusion in this city since Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers.”

Both sides negotiated extensions following the disruption of the taxi industry by rideshare apps and the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, eventually settling on a 2023 deadline for the accessibility goals.

But four years past the initial deadline, only 32% of the city’s total taxi medallions are affixed to wheelchair-accessible vehicles, the plaintiffs argue.

That count is better when controlled for dormant medallions, with accessible cabs making up 42% of the taxis making regular trips, but still short of the negotiated 50%.

“There is no legal basis for defendants to avoid their obligation to abide by the court-ordered agreement,” Taxis For All says..

Further, TLC officials indicated last month that they do not expect to be able to significantly increase the number of accessible cabs going forward, the advocates said.

“[TLC officials]’ January 19, 2024 letter made clear that this breach will continue and [the commissioners] have no intention of even attempting to remedy it,” they wrote.

Of the city’s 13,587 medallions, only 8,751 are “active” — currently affixed to vehicles — according to the most recently available data.

Of those active medallion taxies, 4,304 are accessible, said TLC spokesman Jason Kersten. That’s up from 230 in 2011, when Taxis For All first filed suit.

“We are committed to accessibility and currently drafting proposed rules to make wheelchair accessible taxis more affordable for operators,” Kersten said. “When you factor in our entire fleet, we now have almost three times the number of accessible vehicles than we did five years ago.”

The city’s Uber and Lyft fleet, which is also regulated by the TLC, consists of 84,000 cars, including 5,686 which are wheelchair accessible — roughly 7%.

But disability advocates argued in court Wednesday that an increase in app-based cars doesn’t fill the need for accessible yellow cabs.

“While [the TLC] will argue that any harm is lessened by the evolution of ride sharing apps, street hailing and ride sharing are not interchangeable,” they wrote. “Not all people with disabilities have or can use smart phone technology.”

“The court must not countenance [the TLC]’s willful breach of the … settlement stipulation, an agreement relied upon by New York City’s residents and visitors who require accessible yellow taxis,” they added.