The Subway system’s few elevators are mostly in midtown Manhattan stations; but there is no guarantee that they work
By Radhika Rukmangadhan and Sabina Hung
Every month a group of disabled New Yorkers gathers in front of the MTA headquarters near the southern tip of Manhattan. Some are on wheelchairs, others hold canes. Their journey to Bowling Green was not easy — most of them were driven here by family or friends, others came by buses. But none of them used the subway.
Elevator Action Group, an association of activists who wish to make New York City’s transportation system more accessible, assemble every month at 2 Broadway ahead of the monthly MTA committee meeting to demand that the MTA maintain the few elevators available at Subway stations.
New York City’s accessible stations are largely located in midtown and downtown Manhattan. Most residents, including the disabled, live and commute from the outer boroughs and the upper Manhattan area to get stuff done in Manhattan. Although this disparity in the proximity to subway station accessibility is disadvantageous in itself, the disabled are faced with another challenge: out of service elevators.
Map: Worst performing subway elevators are mostly in Manhattan
Our analysis found that some of the key accessible stations in midtown Manhattan such as the ones in Port Authority and Bryant Park are regularly out of service. Often, they have some of the worst performing elevators in the city.
Table: Worst Performing have been performing worse?
Accessibility at key stations, which have high foot traffic and are places where passengers change stations are crucial in providing reliable commutes for the disabled.
For people with disabilities to travel smoothly, it’s crucial to have working elevators at the start, end, and sometimes in the middle of their journey — spanning from the platform to the mezzanine and subsequently to the station level. If they encounter an unexpected broken down elevator in their journey, they have to get back on the train to travel to another station with a working elevator, which might be miles away from their destination.
With many of the transfer stations, that is stations that serve two or more lines, being present in lower or midtown Manhattan, an elevator outage there might mean a huge disruption to the commute of a disabled person.
Jean Ryan, the president of Disabled in Action, was present at the protest. The 72-year-old wheelchair user said she never really uses the subway anymore out of fear of being stranded because of out-of-order elevators.
Subway elevators are, on average, unavailable for use for 28 hours in a given month across stations in Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. According to a city council report from earlier this year, on average, 34 elevators out of the 350 subway elevators in the city were out of service at any given time in January 2023.
“I rode the subways for 25 years. I was not disabled. Then when I started to become disabled, I continued to use the subways, but with huge difficulty.” Ryan said.
Ryan, who also sits on the MTA Paratransit Advisory Committee added, “In fact, at one point, I was overshooting my neighborhood and going to a different neighborhood on the subway because my neighborhood has zero elevators.”
Eventually, Ryan said, traveling to the nearest station with an elevator became too hard.
“I just could not do it anymore.”
Among its other demands, the Elevator Action Group is rallying at the MTA headquarters to force the organization to settle a lawsuit brought forth that alleges that the MTA, NYC Transit, and the City of New York are failing to maintain the already limited number of elevators in the subway system.
“One of the things that we’ve been fighting for in the Elevator Action Group is for them [the MTA] to follow the maintenance schedules,” Jessica Murray, a researcher at City University of New York and a member of the group said.
“When there’s an unplanned outage, it means that most of the time they haven’t followed the maintenance and as a result, it breaks down unexpectedly,” she said. “ So that’s one of our big requests.”
Other disabled users of the subway have also complained about inaccurate and delayed alerts about elevator and escalator outages, which at times leads to them being stranded at stations.
In the federal lawsuit, one of the plaintiffs, Sasha Blair-Goldensohn, a wheelchair user, alleged that he routinely encountered elevator outages without any notice at all. In some cases, he said was trapped on platforms and could not safely exit stations and had to rely on strangers to physically lift him up or down stairs in order to exit the station. Blair-Goldensohn also claimed that every time this happened, MTA staff was either unable or unwilling to assist him to exit the station safely.
The MTA uses an automated monitoring system called Lift-Net to monitor elevator outages and relay entrapment of passengers to maintenance staff. A 2011 report by the MTA’s Office of the Inspector General found discrepancies in outages reported by the system and a lack of training of maintenance personnel in reporting and resolving outages. During our reporting, we made a Freedom of Information Act request for the latest data from the Lift-Net system. We have not received the data from the MTA at the time of publication.
Elevators are for everyone
In an article, Angela Glover Blackwell, a renowned civil rights advocate talked about the so-called Curb-Cut Effect. The “curb-cut effect” refers to the broader positive impact that accommodations or improvements designed for specific groups of people with disabilities can have on society as a whole. The term originated from the idea of curb cuts, which are sloped ramps cut into sidewalks to assist wheelchair users in crossing streets.
Curb cuts not only help people in wheelchairs but also benefit parents with strollers, delivery workers with carts, and individuals pulling luggage.
In 2019, 22-year-old Malaysia Goodson died after she fell down the staircase of a Manhattan subway station while carrying her stroller. Her one-year-old child survived the fall.
Activists say that a functioning elevator would have prevented her death.
Ryan, talking about the lack of working elevators said, “It is really frustrating, and anxiety producing.”
“And you know, all kinds of people need this. They needed to go to work and come home. They needed to go to the doctor, they needed to go see friends and family and, you know, live their lives!”