An Inaccesible System Slowly Climbs

I have mobility-limited family members, and have had to think through ways for us to get around if they were to visit me in NYC. I started looking into the MTA's accessible stations, and found that Brooklyn's ADA stations are arguably the most reliable, and come closest to 100% operability on average over the last 7 years.

Yet, there is split opinion on these figures. Proportionally, all boroughs do perform consistently above 90% in the above graph, with an upward trend since around 2020. This is promising, sure, but many still complain that the MTA leaves much to be desired for the disabled community.

The sparklines next to the map above show the trends in each borough of how often on average (calculated by minutes of operability in a 24-hour-day) the ADA-equipped stations in that borough are functioning, expressed as a percentage. Recent lawsuits against the MTA allege that "over 80% of New York City's subway stations (360 out of 427) are not equipped with any vertical accessibility, other than stairs."¹ Where I live in Brooklyn, the nearest ADA-compliant station is a half mile away, and the next two nearest options are each roughly a mile away. It's an obvious and massive challenge for mobility-limited riders, and despite the upward trend shown above, many commuters remain left out. While 90% reliability can seem good, it does also suggest a one-in-ten chance that someone in a wheelchair won't be able to get to their train.

Separately, I was drawn in particular to 2022, and what could have contributed to citywide ADA operability falling below the on-average rate for 2019-2025. While analysis of the MTA's annual reports hasn't pointed to anything decisively, we just cannot ignore the Covid-19 pandemic. It's important to note that in 2023, WHO declared the pandemic to no longer be a "public health emergency of international concern." Does this help explain the 2022 dip? Probably not its cause, but it does illuminate the updward trend that started after 2022.

Something else to take into acccount would be the varieties of equipment outages that occur. The MTA divides outages into scheduled and unscheduled. Across most boroughs and citywide, you can see that the unscheduled outages are close to double the scheduled ones--the only exception is in The Bronx, where unscheduled equipment outages are only around two thousand more than scheduled since 2019. Interestingly, on the equipment level, the MTA NYCT Subway Elevator and Escalator Availability documentation lists several omissions from their final availability estimates, including elevators out of service for capital rehabilitation, as well as "most third-party elevators." You might easily argue that these omissions inflate their reported numbers.

There are other data issues, the elephant in the room being that Staten Island is missing from these reports. The MTA just doesn't include it in their reports on equipment operability.