In settling a long-running federal lawsuit against the MTA for its very poor maintenance of the limited number of elevators in the subway, the agency promises to do better in keeping its lifts working and to let passengers know when they are not. This should be entirely possible, as any New Yorker who lives or works in an elevator building knows, but the MTA has struggled with it for years as passengers with disabilities have suffered.
It was on March 23, 1857, when Elisha Otis installed the world’s first commercial passenger safety elevator in the E. V. Haughwout Building, a five-story loft at Broadway and Broome. That was six years before the world’s first underground train, London’s Metropolitan Railway began on Jan. 10, 1863. So elevators even predate subways, yet the MTA had to be sued to provide this basic service.
The Haughwout Building is still there (with newer elevators) in SoHo, having been among first structures in the city to be landmarked in 1965. To get from there to MTA headquarters at 2 Broadway, the quickest way is the R train from Canal St. down to Whitehall, but neither stations are the among 161 of 472 (34%) that even have elevators. The No. 6 at Canal does have elevators, as does Bowling Green, which would necessitate transferring from the No. 6 to the Nos. 4 or 5 at Brooklyn Bridge.
The Canal St. stop on the No. 6 was one of the original 28 stations when the first subway opened on Oct. 27, 1904. The downtown elevator debuted there in March, “on budget and ahead of schedule,” 122 years after passengers began using the stop.
While other lawsuits addressed the need to add more elevators, the lawsuit just concluded was focused on when existing elevators are operating, and if they don’t, why can’t the MTA let passengers know? At any moment, they know exactly where thousands of daily trains are running over hundreds of miles of track. Why is it so difficult to accurately monitor the movement (or non-movement) of about 350 elevators that only travel a few feet up and down?
MTA Chairman Janno Lieber, who has overseen a notable expansion of elevators, said, “I do hope that more and more of our interactions between the MTA and the disability community can take place in conference rooms of collaboration rather than in courthouses of litigation.” We agree, however it took three different lawsuits, two filed in 2017 and another in 2019, to get here because the MTA was not moving on elevators.
And at present the MTA is facing two more civil suits for its crummy Access-A-Ride (AAR) paratransit system of vans for people with disabilities, which has improved, but is still not close to providing equivalent service.
The challenge we have made to MTA leadership for many years is for those bosses to spend a week traveling around the subway without using any stairs, relying on ramps and working elevators to navigate the system. They should experience the frustration of elevators that don’t exist (as is the case in 311 of 472 stations), or in some ways even worse, a busted elevator, that is as good as one that doesn’t exist.
Yes, we know that under a previous court settlement, at least 95% of stations will be accessible by 2055, but that doesn’t do anything for a person with disabilities trying to get around New York today.