Displaying Live Subway Accessibility Info

A new feature launched on the Weekendest allows filtering for accessible stations and the ability to see where there are elevator outages.

It’s no secret that the experience of using the New York City subway system for those with physical disabilities leaves much to be desired. Only about 25% of the stations in the system are currently fully accessible. And that’s assuming all the elevators are working at these stations, but chances are, not all of them are at any given time, rendering them effectively inaccessible. So for many, it can be pretty challenging to plan your travel.

Map of accessible stations in the New York City subway system as seen on the Weekendest.

Launched this week, the Weekendest now has a new toggle option for you to filter only accessible stations. When this option is selected, the map will hide any station that doesn’t provide step-free access. When selecting a train route, stations that are inaccessible are faded out, so you can see clearly which stations are actually available for you to use if you cannot use the stairs or escalators. Additionally, stations that are currently experiencing elevator outages are indicated with a red dot on the map, along with a warning overlay on top of the accessibility icon next to the station name on the route map, so you can quickly see whether or not there would be an interruption to your trip just from a glance.

View of accessible stations for the 7 train. At the time of this screenshot, Court Sq was experiencing elevator outages.

Upon selecting a station where elevator outages are happening, you can read more about the elevator(s) that is/are currently out of service. Unfortunately, the data provided makes it impossible to tell how the outage impacts the overall accessibility of the station, but we can get descriptions of the elevators impacted. From this information, and possibly along with further information linked to at mta.info, you can hopefully figure out yourself if the outages would prevent you from using the station at all.

Mobile view of Court Sq station and information about its elevator outage.

The MTA provides a listing of all escalators and elevators in the system in JSON and XML formats, as well as a feed of outages in the same formats. Using the listing that I filtered by elevator and ADA-compliance, I was able to get the list of subway stations that are accessible. (We should ignore elevators for non-ADA-compliant stations, like 181st Street on the 1 train, where you must use a set of stairs to get to the platform after taking an elevator.) There were a few stations that are accessible but don’t require elevators (e.g. Avenue H on the Q and Wilson Avenue on the L), so I added these manually also.

The Weekendest pulls from the feed of outages periodically, and by mapping the elevators’ ID to the station using the escalator and elevator listing, I’m able to bubble the information all the way up to a system view. Now there’s no need to click on a station to see if there are issues with the elevators.

There’s an additional handful of stations in the system that are only partially accessible, in the way that if you were in a wheelchair, you can only ride a certain direction to or from a the station. The Weekendest displays that information by showing you with a semi-circle if accessibility is only available when traveling in one direction.

Dyckman St station on the 1 train is only accessible for trains headed downtown and is represented by a semi-circle on the map.

The Weekendest and goodservice.io are open-source projects to provide New York City subway riders detailed and up-to-date routing and statuses using public APIs. Contributions are welcome on GitHub. Feedback can be directed to @_blahblahblah or @goodservice_io on Twitter.