Just released from the hospital, there I was, stranded in the subway, far away from home in the middle of the night. I kept falling over and ended up sitting on the cold, cold station floor. Somehow, one step at a time, I made it up the stairs, where I saw a police station at the end of a long hall. After a long wait, an officer came by and told me I had to get to a police station—on my own—for help.
An hour later, I somehow made it to the station. There, I finally found some human kindness. I was treated at Harlem Hospital and a couple of days later, I was fine (apparently, I was suffering acute dehydration from a previous injury).
I'll never forget that hellish night: the helplessness, callousness, discomfort and desperation; the frightful cocoon of concrete, steel, noise, dirt and loneliness.
But I was lucky. My disability was only temporary. For hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, the impossibility of navigating the city's subway system is an all-too familiar experience. While 11 percent of the system's stations are wheelchair accessible, repairs and rerouting make the system torturous for the disabled—like poor Charlie riding the MTA in the old song, they can get on but not off. And there is no magic wand in sight: the MTA's capital budget calls for an expenditure of $192 million for wheelchair accessibility in the 2005-2009 fiscal period, which will create only 15 more handicapped-accessible subway stations.
Paul Fleurangas, an MTA spokesperson, attributes the problem to the system's extreme ageover a hundred years old in some places. Fleurangas says that newer systems, such as Washington, D.C.'s, incorporated handicapped accessibility as part of their initial design. This disadvantage, from a capital construction point of view, is compounded by the bewildering labyrinth of subterranean utilities builders must navigate through to dig an elevator shaft. A lot show up on blueprints, Fleurangas comments. A lot don't.
Even die-hard advocates for the disabled, such as Michael Harris, campaign coordinator for the Disabled Riders Coalition, acknowledge the difficulties the MTA is facing. Every elevator must be custom built, he says, a situation arising from the unpredictable architecture of the stations, and the fact the builders never anticipated that elevators would be retro-fitted a century later. Harris, who is wheelchair-bound himself, describes the process by which the MTA started on the road to handicapped accessibility as a long one. Initially, the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans filed suit against the MTA in 1979. A consent decree issued in 1984 mandated that a hundred key stations be handicapped-accessible by 2020.
Currently, Manhattan, with 1.5 million people, has 23 wheelchair-accessible stations, half of which are in Midtown. Harlem has two wheelchair-accessible stations, Washington Heights, one. Brooklyn, with 2.5 million people, has 14 handicapped-accessible stations, including the recently-completed Stillwell Avenue station at Coney Island, whose renovation cost nearly $300 million. According to Harris, the installation of eight elevators at the Atlantic Avenue station in Downtown Brooklyn cost a cool $83 million. Queens, with 2.2 million people, has 11 handicapped-accessible stations. The Bronx has five handicapped-equipped stations, with a population of 1.3 million (all population figures are from the 2000 census.)
While the largest concentration of handicapped-equipped stations is in the richest borough (Manhattan), and the smallest group is in the poorest borough (the Bronx), disabled advocate Harris refutes the idea that these placements were a result of the MTA's intent, pointing out that the legislation mandating wheelchair accessibility also mandates that minority neighborhoods are fairly represented in the station upgrades.
One problem the system is facing in general is an increase in ridership that is not matched by an increase in funding. According to the Straphanger Campaign, an advocacy group that is part of the New York Public Interest Research Group, ridership is up 17 percent since 1997, or an increase of 600,000 riders. Funding, however, has barely kept up with inflation.
Elevators to Nowhere
While budgetary shortfalls have delayed some MTA capital projects, that has not affected the progress of making the stations accessible, says Harris, who adds that the court orders makes the upgrades sacrosanct. Strangely enough, while his organization fields hundreds of complaints a week from disabled riders, its serial offenders list of elevators with the most problems includes the newest ones. The new elevators need a chance to adjust, and need to be recalibrated.
Subway elevators frequently are out of service. Sensors are being installed on elevators so management will not have to rely on passengers to know when elevators are disabled. The problem is that reporting the elevator out of order is only the first step in the process. According to Harris, the first responders are crews with limited equipment, who can fix something very minor or do an assessment. If the elevator is fairly new, it is its constructor that is liable to fix it under warranty. On the other hand, if the MTA gets sick of waiting for the elevator to be repaired, it can opt to fix it itself. The only problem is that then the contractor may argue that the MTA damaged the elevator, thus voiding the warranty. One of Fleurangas' pet peeves is watching able-bodied people wear out the elevators. Even mothers with strollers are not exempt: We would prefer they fold up their strollers and carry their kids, he says.
In fact, elevators do not thrive in the subway's hostile working environment. Iron filings, the constant vibration from the trains and vandalism all mean that these fantastically expensive elevators have a service life of only 20 years. So it is more than theoretically possible for the older system upgrades to wear out before the new upgrades are in place.
As with anything else in this highly-political city, publicity and the light of day have a tendency to expedite capital repairs. Harris's Disabled Rider's Coalition sued over an elevator that was out for four months at West Fourth. After a TV consumer-affairs reporter, Arnold Diaz, gave it one of his Shame On You awards, the elevator was back in service pretty quickly, according to Harris.
A High-Handed MTA?
Perhaps the most fortuitous and serendipitous thing on the horizon, however, is the soon-to-be-implemented PACIs: airport-like video-data terminals that will let riders know of service problem, and share such information as the next train being five minutes away or two stations away. Certainly a lack of communication is among the subway users' greatest complaints. The MTA plans to have this system online in its A division, comprising 156 stations, this fall.
This increasing commitment to communication is also reflected in the calm, recorded messages in some subway lines (when you can decipher them), aided by more professional announcers.
Interestingly, Harris' most substantial complaints seem to be against what he sees as high-handedness on the MTA's part, rather than any slowness in the upgrading of subway systems. The MTA is a major bureaucracy, he says. I do not think they have the interest of riders at heartI think they are interested solely in advancing their own agenda. But he is not entirely dismissive of the MTA's efforts. They've done some things rather well and other things very poorly, he says.
As a case in point, Harris mentions token booth closings. In spite of the fact that absolutely everyone was against the closings, he says, the authority implemented its plan on its ownand then went and spent a few million dollars on burgundy vests.
Harris says he would like to see more dialogue between MTA officials and disabled advocates. Ultimately, however, the problem may just be institutional: The MTA is an arm of a state government in which the city is constantly at war with rest of the Empire State for precious funds. Upstate residents resent spending money on a system they'll never use.
If you're fully abled and believe that none of this pertains to you, think again: My own horrible experience is a reminder that any one of us could become disabled at any moment. For more information on subway elevators, riders can go online to www.mta.info or call 800-734-6772.
