A few months before Gov. Kathy Hochul ordered some 1,000 members of the state police and National Guard to patrol New York City’s subway system in response to a string of violent attacks, some of them deadly, I had an unsafe subway experience of my own. It didn’t involve crime — unless you’d call the system’s shameful lack of elevators and accessible stations criminal.
An infection in my 10-year-old son’s leg required us to make regular trips from our Brooklyn home to a hospital on East 71st Street in Manhattan. He had been getting around on crutches, but these trips were long, so, much to his embarrassment, I loaded him into his younger sister’s stroller and wheeled him to the nearest accessible subway station, at Atlantic Avenue.
On a good day, it takes three elevator rides to get from street to platform. We entered the first, a dirty green box tacked onto the side of a warehouse, then wheeled to and entered the second, another metal box reeking of urine and industrial cleaning fumes. When we finally got to the third, we discovered it was out of service.
Before I knew it, my son had stood up on his one good leg and, without his crutches, hopped down several steps, around a corner and down a few more. I followed him to the bottom of the stairs, carrying the empty stroller, where he waited, teetering in the center of the narrow platform. I scooped him back into the stroller and stayed put, not daring to further navigate the treacherous strip between the broken elevator and the tracks. We’d made it to the platform safely, but our trip involved far more danger than we expected.
There was a political logic to Ms. Hochul’s decision to deploy troops; it was a response to heightened safety fears among subway riders and workers. When citizens feel unsafe, politicians and city officials tend to act fast to quell those fears. To explain the sudden presence of soldiers in the subway, she described subway crime as “not statistically significant but psychologically significant.”
For millions of commuters, the current state of the system is an urgent safety matter, too. Nearly three-quarters of the city’s 472 stations don’t have elevators, leaving millions of New Yorkers — including older people, the disabled and caregivers with young children — with no choice but to avoid the subway altogether. This issue affects far more New Yorkers than does violent crime, but it is treated much less urgently. The number of New Yorkers age 65 and older has increased by 40 percent since 2000, already surpassing the Bloomberg administration’s projection of 1.35 million by 2030. More than 500,000 New Yorkers have a temporary or permanent disability that makes it difficult for them to walk.
The dangers caused by our broken, inaccessible transportation system are very real, but they don’t often make headlines, perhaps in part because they are hard to measure — an unreported tumble on the subway stairs, the monetary, physical or psychic toll of delayed or canceled trips, errands left undone or the exhausting, harrowing and sometimes painful trials faced by vulnerable commuters. Our family has felt some of these costs: I haven’t taken the subway with my 6-year-old daughter, who has permanent disabilities that require her to use a wheelchair or a stroller every day, for nearly three years. The last time I carried her down the stairs leading to an inaccessible station, I felt something pop in my back. My response has been to avoid riding the subway with her. But the effects of this poorly maintained system affect a broad range of New Yorkers, far beyond those who use wheelchairs.
The lack of elevators in the subway system is not just a matter of the city meeting a legal obligation to make public spaces accessible. It is also a safety issue that should be treated with the same urgency as crime, if not more.
It’s true that state and city officials are working — albeit defensively and slowly — to fix the subway’s accessibility problem. To settle two class-action lawsuits, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority agreed in 2022 to spend billions of dollars to bring 95 percent of stations into compliance with accessibility and safety standards of the federal Americans With Disabilities Act — by 2055. The agency’s plan is crawling along at a pace of roughly 10 station upgrades per year; occasionally, a project gets bolstered by an infusion of federal funds.
In the meantime, older riders are walking backward down stairs into stations; disabled residents who cannot enter stations without an elevator are relegated to inefficient buses or a paratransit ride-share service known for its hourslong trips and leaving passengers stranded. Caregivers of children and adults with mobility limitations risk injury or keep their orbits small.
New Yorkers are all the more impatient for the M.T.A. to fix this because we’ve seen how quickly and effectively officials can act when there’s political will behind fixing a problem — Governor Hochul’s quick mobilization of troops and officers is a case in point. And we’ve seen what can happen when the system works.
When my son and I got off at the Q station on East 72nd Street in Manhattan, it was like entering another world. It was my first time there since it opened in 2017 as part of the century-long Second Avenue subway expansion. The train doors opened onto a spacious and well-lit platform. I paused in the center to get my bearings: We were far underground, yet the space felt open and airy. The Q train had delivered us directly into an accessible waiting area, in front of the entrance to a steel-and-glass elevator with grab bars and generous clearance on all sides — margins wide enough for a person using a wheelchair, stroller, crutches, cane or walker to safely pass or for someone to hold a (small) dance party. We boarded with a delivery person and his bicycle, and the inside smelled as it should, like nothing. Up on the mezzanine, a Taylor Swift song played softly over the speakers.
My son looked up from his book. “Where are we?” he asked. We made our way to the turnstiles; the station agent saw us coming and activated the automatic emergency gate. Passing through it, I stood taller, like royalty. A short, wide corridor led to the elevators — five of them in a row — the station’s crown jewels. We waited alongside others — older couples, AirPodded commuters, the delivery person and his bike. Within seconds, three elevators arrived. We scurried into one of them with two other people; the lucky delivery person got his own.
The door closed, and we were lifted gently up to the street, a ride that any New Yorker or visitor would have appreciated and that should not have felt so precious.
