Janine Lyon's day starts a week in advance.
While most people have the privilege of simply grabbing the keys and racing out the door, the Ballarat woman spends a lot of time planning every single detail any time she wants to leave the house.
"I find I miss out on things; I've waited up to two hours at some stages to get home."
Like the time she went shopping one evening.
Ms Lyon had booked taxis well in advance but when it came time to leave the shopping centre, she was told by the taxi company they could not find a vehicle available.
She was left sitting outside for hours, long after the shops had closed, in the freezing Ballarat cold, waiting for a taxi that would never show.
"I'm finding after five o'clock at night, I can't get a taxi at all. So, it's like there's no night-time taxi drivers available at all for us," Ms Lyon said.
"It's quite frustrating, when you want to go somewhere and you just can't go like everybody else does."
For every outing, Ms Lyon has to work out exactly what times she needs a wheelchair-accessible taxi to pick her up and drop her off at both ends.
But having such a vehicle available to meet her needs is not always guaranteed, no matter how much planning is involved.
The night at the shopping centre, Ms Lyon's partner had to come and collect her, and lift her out of her wheelchair and into his car.
They had to leave her expensive wheelchair out the front of the shops until the next day because they had no other way of transporting it home.
"The impact of not having taxis for people with disabilities, mental health and everything at the moment, you know, it's really big," Ms Lyon said.
Not enough to meet demand
There were 975 active wheelchair-accessible vehicles (WAVs) registered in Victoria in June 2021, according to the Commercial Passenger Vehicles Victoria annual report 2020-21.
More than 1 million people in Victoria identify as living with a disability, 17 per cent of whom cannot access public transport such as trains, trams and buses.
Elderly people and those with an injury are also reliant on accessible "maxi taxis".
And in some regional cities there are none or very few to go around.
In Ballarat alone, there are only 10 registered wheelchair-accessible taxis available, and on average only six of those are on the road at any given time.
Emotional impact
With no priority system in place, wheelchair-accessible taxis can be booked out by abled-bodied people and large groups even if someone in a wheelchair requires transportation.
"People rely on accessible taxi cabs, and sometimes there's only one in each local town," Disability Resource Centre campaign manager Ally Scott said.
And it's often impossible to get a wheelchair taxi during peak hour because community groups and NDIS providers have made standing bookings to take groups of residents to day care centres, workplaces or schools.
"What that means is that people sometimes just cannot go out and the emotional impact of not being able to connect with friends, family, job opportunities, community, study, it just cannot be overestimated," Ms Scott said.
The Disability Resource Centre is leading a "transport-for-all coalition" with the aim of making every journey on public transport reliably and independently accessible for all users.
"What we're hearing is that the experience of loneliness and social isolation has steadily increased," Ms Scott said.
No drivers, no incentives
Stephen Armstrong, owner of Ballarat Taxis for almost 40 years, said the shortage of drivers caused by COVID-19 border closures was making it difficult to keep taxis on the road.
"We're in the same boat as most other industries in and around Ballarat, and for that matter, throughout the whole of Victoria, who are struggling to get a workforce at the moment," Mr Armstrong said.
"We've advertised far and wide, even putting advertisements on the back of our vehicles."
Mr Armstrong said an all-access taxi cost $95,000 once it was retrofitted with wheelchair-lifting devices.
"To be honest, if we were running fully as a commercial business, we wouldn't be operating wheelchair-accessible taxis, because they're just not a viable business to get into," Mr Armstrong said.
In 2017, the Victorian government introduced a subsidy of up to $44,000 for companies that had wheelchair-accessible vehicles prior to that time.
"But there are no subsidies available for vehicles that weren't already operating at that date, which means that if you wanted to add additional vehicles to your fleet, then you would be up for the full cost of those vehicles," Mr Armstrong said.
"The government could extend the wheelchair-accessible-taxi subsidy program out for new vehicles as well as the pre-existing ones from the 2017 regulations and that would incentivise some new operators to perhaps take up that service," he said.
For Ms Lyon, a solution could not come fast enough.
Just as COVID lockdowns and restrictions limited travel for all Victorians during the pandemic, Ms Lyon said isolation was an everyday reality for her.
"I think people in COVID lockdown really struggled. Well, that's my life. That's my life in normal," she said.
"I feel like we've been locked down in life for a long time, because we can't just go out when we wanted to go out."
Public Transport, Roads, and Road Safety Minister Ben Carroll said the Victorian government put accessibility for people with disabilities at the centre of its public transport strategy and taxis played "a critical role".
“Part of the reason behind increasing the lifting fee by $5 to $26, in conjunction to better support the multipurpose taxi program, is to really signify to the market and to operators our government's commitment to transit equity and supporting people with disabilities [to] have access to a taxi,” he said.
