The MTA and advocates for New York’s disabled have been in a seemingly decades-long fight over accessibility. Faced with an unfunded federal mandate, the MTA agreed to make 100 key stations ADA-accessible by 2020, and although the authority is on pace to do just that, it hasn’t always gone above and beyond what’s required by the letter of the law. Furthermore, as stations themselves become accessible, significant kinks in the system remain.
This week, Michele Kaplan, a wheelchair-bound New Yorker, and DNA Info reporter Janet Upadhye toured the subway system, and from the eyes of one who cannot walk, the picture painted in the article is a grim one. Even as stations themselves are wheelchair-friendly, gaps remain between the train and platform that are too wide or too steep to navigate. Those of us with full use of our legs may not notice the slight step, but it can be a real barrier for wheelchair users. “The elevators make it accessible for me to get to the platform,” Kaplan said. “But some trains are so high above the platform that my wheelchair cannot make it onto the train…This happens all the time. After a long day it’s the worst, because I never know what time I’ll get home.”
The problem persists because train and platform heights are not identical throughout the system, and short of rebuilding every non-conforming platform, the MTA is left with few options. Ramps, employed by commuter rail systems, aren’t practical for the subway, and frustration seems to rule the day. Kaplan has started a Tumblr to document the problem and hopes to raise the issue with MTA head Joe Lhota. A resolution is a long way off.
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Lets not forget that the new cabs wont be accessible either. Its hard to find out, but it looks like the same cabs (Nissan NV200) in London will be.
Oh no, they’re replacing those great classic London cabs with that ugly-ass Nissan SUV thingie?!
NY seriously needs to call Transport for London and ask them how they did everything they’ve done — their accessiblity has improved by leaps and bounds on a system much older than NY’s.
Oh, wait. We TRIED that. We hired in Jay Walder from Transport for London. Then he was hounded out by ignorant City Council members, ignorant and budget-cutting state legislators, and deranged union bosses. Hong Kong snapped him up.
So there you have it. NYC won’t do the right thing because the politicians don’t want it to do the right thing and neither do the union bosses.
I’m pretty positive that in Bogota, the buses have deployable ramps at all doors.
Is that feasible in New York on subway cars?
If you let passengers try to operate the ramp, they will kill another passenger, or injure themselves for a payout. At recently ADA stations, the MTA raised the platform near the center of the platform for 1 subway car length to avoid the step.
No. I don’t think you can justify delaying a thousand people so one wheelchair can board anyway, but just operationally it doesn’t make sense.
Having a sliding ramp is theoretically possible, but if it doesn’t exactly meet the platform it will be bent by people stepping on it, become unuseable (unable to retract), and delay the whole train. Unfortunately, unless the platforms can be guaranteed the same height (and passenger loadings the same all day) this solution won’t be workable on trains.
The difference between buses and trains is that the ramp on buses (certainly in London) is deployed by the driver only when needed. That would be more difficult on a subway with crowded platforms and headway/delay issues.
Changing platform heights throughout the entire system isn’t going to happen. The top-down fix is not is not always the right fix.
These are possible and will work with a little inconvenience. Not perfectly; it may require help from someone nearby.
i) Make the front wheels on chairs slightly larger.
ii) Back the chair over the obstruction. The back wheels are large enough to easily cross the bump, then the fronts can be pulled over.
iii) Require all riders to assist someone in a chair. Make that part of the MetroCard terms, just like an airplane ticket. That was once known as common courtesy, seems to be considered a ghastly thing now.
This won’t work perfectly, sometimes not at all, but it will at least work starting now.
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And this actually makes sense:
“At recently ADA stations, the MTA raised the platform near the center of the platform for 1 subway car length to avoid the step.”
The LIRR and Metro-North raised their platforms in the 1960s.
“train and platform heights are not identical throughout the station……..”
You mean “throughout the SYSTEM”, right?
I see that it’s been corrected now.
Though it seems they aren’t even consistent throughout the station in many cases. That probably has more to do with upward and downward grades on older lines though.
I’ve always wondered what would a wheelchair bound customer do if the train needed to be evacuated in between stations?
FDNY and a backboard is the usual solution.
The New York City Subway will probably have to start using bridge plates (at least at some stations) if they want to make the subway really accessible.
Most other cities don’t seem to have the same issues for accessible travel:
On the Boston T Subway they use bridge plates on the Orange, Red and Blue Lines (don’t know what’s used on the Green Line Trolleys). The former token agents, now customer assistant agents (don’t know their full titles) that are stationed in every station place the bridge plates so wheelchair customers can get on and off. In Boston I’ve seem them simply ride with a wheelchair customer (for a few stops) or have one agent board a wheelchair before calling ahead to the stop they were getting off at and saw that agent jogging downstairs to get a wheelchair getting off an arriving train.
In Chicago I’ve seen trains delayed while they moved just a short ways up the platform (this was on the long continuos platforms on the downtown red line subway) to a place where a wheelchair could get off (the train first stopped in front of a pillar).
All Commuter Rail Lines and Amtrak just use bridge plates. The exception is low-level platforms: At Hoboken on NJ Transit for instance and at any Amtrak station using single-level equipment at a low-level platform they have a large unwieldy manually operated (by a hand crank) mobile wheelchair lift that lives on the platform (there brown wheelchair lift enclosure boxes popping up at nearly every tiny small town station across America). I have seen conductors running off the train to these boxes to unlock them and get a wheelchair off. On the double-decker Superliners (which can’t run into New York City, there way too tall) the operation is even simpler, a ramp is kept aboard the car and fitted to the door that is only a short ways from ground level and used for wheelchair passengers to board the lower-level of the cars.
The difference is that other systems have been trying.
NYC has been grudging and hostile to disabled people.
That’s really all there is to it. The systems which were *trying* started changing their policies and procedures, and retrofitting their platforms and trains, back when the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was passed. Most of them have made rapid progress since the ADA was passed in 1990.
Most have committed to go further than the law requires rather than hiding in the exemptions written into the law; Boston has declared its intention to make every single stop level-boarding, for example, which is not required by law (…yet).
Meanwhile, NY is *still* trying to avoid wheelchair access even when completely rebuilding stations (and should get hammered with penalties for that).
This is one of the overlooked reasons why we need a modern surface rail system. The great drawback to subways and els is simply that subways/els and physical disabilities do not mix well. Even on compliant-from-the-start stations like the new ones on the SAS, the the absurd depth rules out much of the convenience even for the able-bodied, never you mind wheelchair users.
With surface rail, stops are extremely cheap, level boarding is trivial to achieve, and speeds and capacity can rival IRT local trains. Queens Boulevard is one of my favorite examples. The local 7 stations can practically never be made compliant, there is a ROW that even historically was used for a streetcar, it supplements or maybe even partly replaces two busy local bus lines, and it could perhaps offer a one-seat ride to a nominal job center (LIC) from more distant reaches of Queens Boulevard that are only served by the IND.
Huh? Throw in an elevator, all differences eliminated…
Not to mention, even surface rail often needs elevators to handle people that can’t use stairs/escalators, because passenger under/overpasses are very common in station design (for good reasons).
Maybe there aren’t a lot, but there are some stations that probably really couldn’t support elevators. The stretch of the 7 I mentioned is one. Street running LRT is no less safe than running buses and stations need not be much more than the curb of a sidewalk. The major upside is that it is more convenient than any other mode for the disabled.
To be clear, I wasn’t suggesting every el/subway get a parallel LRT line, only that LRT could be used to get people to compliant stations and there are times when this would mesh nicely with other needs – again, that 7 example is one where two busy bus services could possibly justify the conversion. (It’s not perfect for the disabled. Many will still have to transfer to compliant stations, but it helps.)
Nowhere in the video I’ve seen on her tumblr page do I clearly see she’s trying to board in the designated area (there are signs) where the platform is modified to eliminate the step and gap.
Yeah, it sounds like maybe she is just failing to take advantage of the work the MTA has done there. It’s not fair, to be sure, that a wheelchair user has to board in one of two doors and perhaps miss the train for not being at those doors, or can’t position themselves to be at the exit when they get to their destination, but there is in fact a system available to ensure they are able to board.
Yes, this is off-topic for today, but I just want people to see this message: Almost EVERYDAY now, there is a bad smoke condition near DeKalb Ave. Something must be wrong over there that they are NOT actually fixing each time that they deal with that situation.
MTA is BBQ the signal cables yet again? 🙂
Are the concrete rail ties that have been installed on the IRT and BMT tracks over the past 25 years slightly thicker than the original wooden ties they replaced? I’m just asking because I never remember back in the old days there being such an elevation gap between the door plates on the cars and the platforms, but I did notice in the waning days of the Redbirdson the IRT that the trains just didn’t seem to line up with the platform edges the way they used to do.
Ms. Kaplan, if you haven’t done so, please write to your state legislative representatives. Wait and see if they will come up with the funding to correct the problems.
The boarding area should be delineated clearly (painted on the floor for the width of the platform) if that is not currently the case. Plus, due to the trains being coupled in 4 or 5-car sets, it’s tempting to think that the ends of the trains are wheelchair-accessible, but at the stations they would not be.
Out of curiosity, on the Franklin Avenue shuttle, on which end(s) of the train is the boarding area designated? The most accessible line, at 75%, 3 out of 4 stations.
I encountered this in the print version of the Queens Chronicle. I was aware that entrances at Briarwood – Van Wyck Boulevard were going to be reconstructed, but this is the first time I’m hearing that there will be an elevator at this station. In any event, the amount of vitriol in the letter makes me angry — at the author! Show me “a thousand wheelchair-bound subway commuters here in Briarwood” who will use the subway at that station on a regular basis. I can’t imagine a thousand wheelchair-bound people using the busiest ADA-accessible station elevator daily. I’ve never seen queues of more than 2 or 3 wheelchair-bound passengers at elevators ever.
I do have use of both my legs but I am realistic that the chances of dexterity diminish with each passing day as I head to old age as most of us will . The question is , do we bankrupt the system or make it unusable for all so a precious few have the same access ? At what point does this drive for total equality on everything just doom us to having full equality to nothing? I have older parents and family members and taking the subway is more difficult though not impossible but we take care of them , yes using a car which is not available for all but for mother in law signing her up for those special buses that pick one up right at home.
This topic is touchy for me as I am not only Deaf but also spent the summer recuperating from a broken ankle where I was confined to using a rolling crutch and learned how difficult it is to get around on the MTA. Buses are better, definitely, but the subway has some serious problems. I resent at some level the issue that this is an “unfunded” mandate. It might well be, but from my view it’s like civil rights in general: they shouldn’t need to be mandated, but often have to be because the majority will always forget the minority. There are places that have had strong accessibility built into their system by design from the beginning. (DC’s system was delayed in opening because all the stations weren’t yet accessible.) SF has incredible accessibility laws that extend beyond the subway to store and street design. NYC’s subways aren’t just bad for wheelchairs, our sidewalks are downright awful too.
The reality is, our country is aging rapidly, and our older generation is moving back away from the suburbs and into the city. We have younger families with stroller we need to be concerned about how things push pull and roll over our city from subways to sidewalks and into our buildings. These things matter and are part of making NY a welcoming environment.
If I had to pick a place to live if I were to have a permanent mobility issue, I’d probably pick SF just for this reason. Even with the Hills, it’s far easier to get around in part because the policies are in place to assure it — WITHOUT the Federal government pushing it forward.
The fact that NYCT (and LIRR, actually) keep trying to evade the accessibility requirements in heavily rebuilt stations is proof that they aren’t even trying.
Agencies which are serious about providing service to disabled people do *not* try to evade the “new construction” rules.
“The MTA and advocates for New York’s disabled have been in a seemingly decades-long fight over accessibility.”
Yes, decades. The first lawsuits and the first settlements date from shortly after the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, if I have my history correct. The MTA keeps dragging its feet and trying to evade the intent of the law. Every so often Congress strengthens the law, meaning that the MTA ends up in a worse and worse position.
Agencies which moved early to comply with the Architectural Barriers Act of 1968 and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964 have had a substantial advantage. NYC tried to ignore all of this, and was then shocked when the ADA passed.
But hey… the NYCHA is WORSE.
http://www.citylimits.org/news.....-not-apply
And they’re still at it:
http://www.ytaccess.com/2012/0.....a-lawsuit/
What the hell is wrong with your NYC bureaucracies? Most of the country’s government agencies have managed to get a decent attitude during the FORTY YEARS since the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 required them to treat disabled people decently. NYC has been particularly awful!