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Infographic: How Much Of The NYC Subway Is Accessible?
By
Clarisa Diaz
Published Mar 5, 2020
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Clarisa Diaz, Gothamist/WNYC
By
Clarisa Diaz
Published Mar 5, 2020
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With only approximately 25% of its 472 stations accessible, the MTA has said it hopes to make NYC’s subway system 100% accessible by 2034 through the Fast Forward program. However, mapping the current and planned accessible stations under Fast Forward shows how much work the MTA still has ahead of it.
After the first phase of Fast Forward tackles 70 stations by 2024, the MTA will still have about 287 stations to make wheelchair accessible.
That means to reach the goal of 100% accessibility by 2034, the MTA would need to make around 143 stations ADA accessible for each of the next capital plans (2025-2029 and 2029-2034). The MTA "would have to be working on this right now at a much larger scale,” said Jessica Murray, a PhD candidate at CUNY who studies the impacts of transportation on people with disabilities. At the current pace of 70 stations every five years, it would be more like 2044 when the entire system could be fully accessible.
The idea that, as the MTA states in its Fast Forward plan, “no rider will be more than two stops away from an accessible station within five years," or by 2024, seems unlikely given that so many stations won’t be accessible by then—and over half of the city’s ADA-compliant stations would continue to be mostly concentrated in Manhattan.
There’s also an issue of scale: two stations away in Manhattan is a much shorter distance than two stations away in other boroughs. “In Brooklyn, that could be a mile away,” Murray said. But it’s not easy for wheelchair users to get around in Manhattan either: there’s only one accessible station on the entire Central Park periphery, and most accessible stations are in lower Manhattan or the Upper East Side. In reality, there are probably far fewer accessible stations than the MTA claims, with some stations only accessible in one direction, elevators going out-of-service on a daily basis without notice, and a lack of accessible transfers.
Areas like Sunset Park, the Bronx, and Astoria are relative transit deserts, even with new station renovations. Further, with transfer stations counted as key stations, some stops are counted multiple times in the MTA’s plan. “They [the MTA] got away with a little bit of trickery by saying Times Square is technically five stations,” explained Murray.
Despite counting multiple stations at a stop and counting all the stops the MTA says are or will be accessible, a line-by-line breakdown shows the actual accessibility of subway lines is approximately 29% or lower. The worst line in the city for accessibility is the G, followed by the W, J, R, and N lines. “You need a subway stop at the beginning and end of your trip. So if you can only get to 40% of the stations at the beginning and 40% at the end, you can only make 16% of the trips an able-bodied person can make [on the same line],” described Murray.
Here’s the full breakdown:
Clarisa Diaz, Gothamist/WNYC. Source data from the MTA.
The MTA’s position for decades has been that elevators are too expensive and too cumbersome to install in stations, but Murray points out there may be another reason that has factored into the failure to install elevators. “I think they’ve always looked at it as, ‘How many people are actually using wheelchairs? Can we really justify spending yada yada millions (it used to be millions now it’s billions) of dollars for 1% of the population?’ Forget about the fact that it’s a human right and a civil right, forget that they’ve received federal funding for all their capital construction programs and the ADA was intended to have this gradual enforcement over time. You don’t have to make it accessible overnight, but you should have a plan.”
As Murray and many other advocates put it, accessibility is for everyone.
To find accessible stations near you, check out Murray’s Google map:
Clarisa Diaz is a designer and reporter for Gothamist / WNYC. You can follow her on Twitter @Clarii_D.
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Clarisa Diaz
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