An Inaccessible System Slowly Climbs

My dad's in a wheelchair. Which means that if he were ever to visit me in NYC, I'd have to think through ways for us to get around easily. Thinking this through, I knew that MTA data is often publicly available, and I started to envision this situation of ours as a project I could build, through which I could explore GitHub actions and create something between a dashboard and a journalism story. And that's what this page is.

I live in Brooklyn, and in my first exploration of the MTA's accessible stations, I was happy to find 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 2020.¹ This is promising, sure, but many still complain that the MTA leaves much to be desired for the disabled community.

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 presents an obvious and significant challenge for mobility-limited riders, and despite the upward trend in operability shown up top, many commuters remain left out. And while 90% reliability systemwide 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.

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."²

The 2022 dip in citywide operability (the only real anomaly in an otherwise upward trend) points to something deeper; the MTA's data has built-in blindspots. The equipment documentation itself lists omissions from their availability estimates: elevators out for capital rehabilitation, and "most third-party elevators" are simply excluded from the count. This means the numbers shown may already be inflated on first impression.

Then there's the outage data. Unscheduled failures run nearly double the scheduled ones across most boroughs (except The Bronx, unscheduled equipment outages number only around two thousand more than scheduled outages since 2019). The 2022 dip might not reflect actual deterioration; it might simply reflect a year when the agency reported differently, or when maintenance schedules shifted in ways that changed what got counted as "operability."

To sum up, the upward trend, the borough-by-borough breakdown, the daily operability figures are all encouraging, but still limited. For straphangers like my father, who depend on ADA equipment, there's still plenty of room for improvement.