Up or Out
Improving information services for New York City’s subway escalators and elevators
Alan Timothy Lunceford-Stevens wanted to take the 7 train home from Grand Central, but couldn’t. The elevators and escalators that lead to the train were taken out for repair — at the same time. Unable to take the stairs due to his disability, Lunceford-Stevens needed the elevator or escalator to access the station.
“There were other disabled people standing around there,” he said, “and none of us knew how to get down to the train.” When Lunceford-Stevens asked an onsite MTA employee for an accessible alternative, they suggested he walk half a mile to the closest accessible station and then take the train back to Grand Central; just to get underground. Lunceford-Stevens waited 45 minutes for a bus instead.
There are 472 subway stations in the New York City subway; more than three times that of Chicago’s subway (145). However, of those 472 stations, only a quarter are accessible (121); Chicago’s is 71% accessible (103). The New York subway’s lack of accessible stations means it’s more difficult for people with mobility issues to ride the subway.
To be clear, I do not have a disability nor do I speak for those who do. But I am someone who has worked with people with physical disabilities my whole life. Before I joined the M.A. in Social Journalism program at the Newmark J-School I was a teaching assistant at The Henry Viscardi School (HVS), in Long Island, New York, a school for students with physical disabilities. My mother has been a physical therapist at HVS for over 21 years so, I grew up across the street from the school.
While working at HVS, I helped feed, transfer and teach students with disabilities such as cerebral palsy and osteogenesis imperfecta. So when I was instructed to pick a community to report on for the program, it was clear. I would use the community engagement techniques I learned in social journalism to serve the information needs of New Yorkers with physical disabilities.
Information gathering
Through my conversations with HVS students, faculty and staff, who live in the city, it quickly became clear that transportation was one of the biggest issues on their mind. The subway in particular. Getting around when you have to rely on accessible stations is hard. Accessible stops are far and few.
Of the 122 NYC neighborhoods served by the subway, 62 do not have a single accessible station. According to a 2018 report put out by NYC Comptroller Scott Stringer, these “ADA Transit Deserts” strand 640,000 New Yorkers with limited mobility issues, elderly residents and parents with strollers. Limited access to the subway limits people with mobility issues from navigating the city.
After learning that I live in a neighborhood without a single accessible stop, I traveled to class using only accessible subway stations and documented my commute over Instagram. It took me an hour longer than it normally does. And I don’t have a mobility issue.
Already limited to a handful of stations, commuters with mobility issues are further inconvenienced by out-of-service elevators and escalators. There were over 16,000 outages last year, with 44 occurring daily. The risk of being trapped underground by out-of-service an elevator or escalator prevents New Yorkers with disabilities from taking the subway altogether. “I have not been able to ride the subway in 25 years,” said Jean Ryan, President of Disabled in Action, a disability rights organization. “I know the elevators are often out of service,” she said.
Sasha Blair-Goldensohn, Google Engineer and co-founder of the Elevators Action Group at Rise and Resist, said it’s the unplanned outages — which were 72% of last year’s total outages — that cause sudden, unknowingly long delays; “It’s 2 hours one day, 20 minutes the next day, a day here,” he said. “You never know.”
Gaps in the system-wide coverage of accessible stations mean that alternatives can be far and time-consuming. Similar to Lunceford-Stevens’s story, Samuel Santaella, Transit Ninja, was stopped by both an out-of-service elevator and escalator. The onsite suggestion is to take the subway to another station, then take two buses back. That’s over an hour just to get up from the subway.
There are a few ways riders can check for outages. The MTA recommends riders plan their commutes using the accessible trip feature on their website or myMTA smartphone app. The live status of elevators and escalators is updated online and integrated into the myMTA App, so commuters can plan their trip accordingly.
However, through attending community events and listening to community members, I recognized that not everyone owns a computer or smartphone. Researching online, I found that 27% of NYC households lack broadband Internet and 20% of New Yorkers do not own smartphones. These New Yorkers have to either find an internet connection to receive outage updates or access the information through an offline channel.
In an attempt to fill this information gap, the MTA does provide outage information through text messages. Riders can subscribe to a station through the myMTA alerts to receive an alert when their elevator or escalator goes in and out of service. However, the text service requires you to follow a link to check the current status of the outage online, limiting its offline functionality.
Given what’s currently available, New Yorkers without an internet connection do not have easy access to outage information. For that reason, I’m building my own text-service with the help of the community. I’m calling it Up or Out.
Up or Out
Users first text the service to get its attention, then reply with the line they hope to take and then the station. Up or Out will then report back any outages it finds and when the elevator or escalator will be back in service.
I built a prototype to give people a basic idea of how it would work. I made sure to workshop the idea with community members before I built the prototype. I couldn’t build something for them without their suggestions.
The key difference between Up or Out and the MTA’s text service is that users will be able to text back and forth with Up or Out. They can request the information when they need it rather than waiting on an update from the MTA. Users also wouldn’t have to follow a link to check the current status. Even though when users have access to the information doesn’t actually fix the elevator or escalator, texting-in, rather than texting-out, allows New Yorkers to have more control over when they receive the information they need.
Work-in-progress
That said, requesting status information will be the most basic feature of Up or Out. I’m currently building the service with Andrew Glass, the Web Developer behind nycaccessible.com, which provides real-time subway station accessibility information, online and through e-mail and text alert.
I hope to expand the service to include functions like alternative routing, a feature I was told by the community would be extremely helpful. The idea being that if Up or Out detects an outage, it will be able to suggest an accessible alternative. Beyond that, I would like to include the ability for users to ask wayfinding questions, report outages and more.
Despite the addition of more features, the issue of subway accessibility is much larger than a text-service can solve. It takes billions of dollars and years of renovation to upgrade the New York City subway system. In September 2019, the MTA released its proposed 2020–2024 Capital Plan MTA, which includes $5.2 billion dollars to improve the accessibility of 70 stations — “the largest investment inaccessibility in New York City Transit history.”
Adding those 70 stations brings the number of accessible stops to 191, which is less than half of the total system (191/472 total stations). The MTA plans to make the entire system fully accessible by 2034. Until then, I want to make sure that New Yorkers with mobility issues have the information they need to navigate the system.
