New York Has a Great Subway, If You’re Not in a Wheelchair
nytimes.com
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Better yet, take the money that government would otherwise spend on building all the wheelchair accomodations, and just distribute that between wheelchair users. I am sure many of them would prefer that over subway improvements which they might never use.
"Disabled people cannot reach their [work, school, childcare, w/e]", if true, is a valid problem. There are multiple ways to solve that problem. "NYC subway does not have wheelchair accomodations" is a useless outrage over circumstantial symptoms.
For example, there used to be a law in chicago that saloons needed to have a place to tie up at least 10 horse. That law quickly became outdated when the next best thing, the car, came around.
Any complications I am missing?
This is important since ParaTransit is pegged to the regular public transit fare ($2.75 a ride as of right now), and it'd be unreasonable to expect someone with low income to float a large expense ($20+) until they are reimbursed.
Nor would it be reasonable to expect the government to reimburse arbitrary amounts of money incurred for travel from parties unknown to the government.
The complication is that wait times for this service is awful, because the incentives do not encourage a sizable accessible vehicle fleet. The service advises users to be prepared for up to an hour's total wait + travel time to go less than 3 miles.
In contrast, in the same amount of time an able bodied person can take the subway 20+ miles.
It'd be unreasonable to expect a handicapped person to be able to travel as easily as an able-bodied person, but the disparity is pretty extreme.
Even in the sidewalks, the lips of the sidewalks that slope towards the street in intersections, it is just not people with wheelchairs that benefit from them, but anybody with carrying a stroller, rolling luggage for a trip, etc...
When I had a soccer injury 10 years ago, for one month straight I couldn't walk without some major pain. I had to plan my trips according to places that I could access, and it gives you some insight into people that are really disabled.
Underground station bathrooms, if they were ever built, have been locked down since 9/11. Elevators have substituted as a private, out-of-the-way place to attract the worst of the worst in terms of piss, shit, and homeless people in various stages of crisis. Kind of degrading that we expect/require people with disabilities to use them, really.
i am much more annoyed when somewhere they install that special wheelchair stairs lift instead of proper vertical elevator anyone with small children can use
i would be curious, people make these decisions don't have children that they think that wheelchair lift usually locked by special key is enough? because by my experience zero parents will call stuff to use this list for stroller and rather ask strangers to help them
Modern accessibility policy is focused in a large part around allowing people with accessibility requirement to live as normal a life as possible. It's not going to change overnight, but by making sure that all new construction and refurbishments are accessible, over time the situation will improve. The only quibble is over the extent of funding that will be made available.
there is some odd perception flying around world that US is particularly developed country, while reality about their infrastructure contradicts this
In addition to that, I wager there's value in extending the current infrastructure so as to not ostracize disabled people even further.
The "wheelchair that can climb stairs" vs "adding ramps everywhere" comparison.
I feel like in the past the latter made more economic sense, but at some point technology might tip the balance the other way.
Start with new stations and ones a few apart and work your way in.
This is true, and also why NYC has ParaTransit for disabled people, which amounts to an on-demand car/minibus service that is paid for by the transit agency.
The service levels are pretty terrible, though, because it turns out the private operators that actually provision these rides don't have a lot of incentive to go through the costs of operating accessible vehicles to address such a small market. Wait times for a vehicle are extremely long.
More importantly, disability and motion-handicaps are not binary, nor are they always permanent. There exist a large number of people who have difficulty climbing stairs who are not wheelchair-bound (see: the elderly, the pregnant, people coming from the airport...), and there exist a significant number of people who temporarily suffer from motion handicaps, whose handicaps are too temporary to be enrolled in ParaTransit (see: a guy with a leg cast).
Accessible stations and vehicles help these people also, not just the stereotype of the permanent wheelchair-bound person. The reality is that accessiblity features in our infrastructure benefit a lot more than those who are permanently or completely handicapped.
And it'd still be cheaper than building accessibility over existing subway infrastructure.
You make a very good point that disability is not binary; there is an entire spectrum from Michael Phelps to Steven Hawking. In some ways, having three kids on your back can be considered a [temporary] disability ;) My main point is that going down the percentage of affected population drastically changes the ROI of changing the infrastructure as a whole versus addressing the people involved individually. And wheelchairs specifically is fairly far down that scale.
> "Better service would require paying market rates - by the city, or partly by the city."
This is what happens. The riders themselves pay the "regular" transit fare of $2.75, and the agency (which is actually a state agency, but partially funded by the city) pays the rest. The service is operated at private industry rates.
The problem here is there is simply very little incentive for cab company or driver to service this demographic. Accessible vans are expensive and they reduce "normal" passenger capacity. Accessible customers require more time - both traveling to pickups, as well as getting in/out of the vehicles, which is time the driver is not being paid.
The small size of the customer base also means drivers spend much more time than usual traveling to a pickup.
The natural equilibrium state of this market, given the cost of providing the service, and the size of the customer base, results in very sub-par service levels. We can improve this somewhat by paying dramatically more for these rides, but that undermines the ROI argument pretty badly.
> "My main point is that going down the percentage of affected population drastically changes the ROI of changing the infrastructure as a whole versus addressing the people involved individually."
I agree - but my contention is that modeling the accessibility issues with the NYC subway as "permanently wheelchair-bound population" vs. "everyone else" is very incomplete. The ROI on accessibility improvements to our infrastructure must take into account all users of such features, not just the most extreme/permanent users.
The beneficiaries of, say, elevators in stations is the union set of [pregnant people, elderly people, wheelchair-bound people, crutch-bound people, people carrying large amounts of cargo, ...] - plus probably more categories I've missed. The union of these sets is pretty darned large, and a heck of a lot larger than simply the wheelchair-bound population.
The ROI argument only works if we assume a much narrower pool of users than it would be in reality.
Wouldn't a service like Uber avoid this issue? The cost for a disabled persons Uber ride won't be significantly above the cost for my Uber ride. While the cost of a dedicated service, per ride, will be significantly higher.
> The problem here is there is simply very little incentive for cab company or driver to service this demographic. Accessible vans are expensive and they reduce "normal" passenger capacity. Accessible customers require more time - both traveling to pickups, as well as getting in/out of the vehicles, which is time the driver is not being paid.
The cost for a disabled person's Uber ride is significantly above the cost of your Uber ride, and so there's no incentive for Uber to service this market at the same price.
Keeping people from riding the subway because they're disabled is a form of discrimination under ADA. IANAL but I think cities like NYC need to have a plan for upgrading accessibility features and show progress month over month. Failure to make any progress would probably leave them liable for violations of the ADA + Rehabilitation Act (that's what happened to Boston's MBTA). With the threat of a lawsuit, it's probably cheaper to just get a plan and start upgrading stations. Plus, it helps people.
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2015/p0730-us-disability....
according such statistics it's also half of the women experiencing domestic violence, when you tell your wife you wanna watch different TV show than her, it's some verbal abuse or violence and similar crap with rape statistics in Sweden
Segregationist policy is un-American.
Spending money efficiently and helping disabled people more than modifying every building would, doesn't in any way imply that the government is a for profit corporation.
I live in Boston, and follow the politics and spending of the MBTA pretty closely. Their current paratransit system costs $40-$50 per trip, EACH WAY. It costs them about $100 million/year to operate (http://www.mbta.com/uploadedfiles/About_the_T/Panel/Paratran...)
It's expensive because they need large vans with wheelchair lifts, trained drivers, and service is door to door. They cover the entire service area of the regular public transport system, and coordinating rides is difficult and time-consuming. If this were replaced by a cab system, you'd have to train drivers and still get the expensive large vans. You'd need a way to guarantee service availability and reliability. That sort of thing isn't cheap.
Looking at elevators, even a very expensive 2-3 story elevator is $50k to install, and might be $10k yearly for a service contract (http://www.facilitiesnet.com/elevators/article/Economics-of-...) Certainly, the cost of elevators, escalators, and other accommodations are trivial in the MBTA budget, compared to the cost of paratransit. I've read a lot of budget documents from them, and I've never seen "elevators and escalators" as a line item. I mean, we're talking a $2 billion budget. $100 million is expensive. Even if you cut it in half somehow, it's still expensive. $1 million for elevator maintenance? Not expensive.
Because of the extreme expense of paratransit, it's difficult to sign up for the program. You can't simply arrive in Boston as a tourist in a wheelchair and expect to hop on the paratransit system. You apply, you submit records, you interview, you get issued a special account -- it's a big deal. They cover the entire service area of the existing public transport system and coordination is difficult, so you have to request a ride at least an hour before it arrives.
In addition, "the disabled" are not a group of people who just sit at home until their next doctors appointment or grocery store trip, and are happy to apply for a paratransit pickup the day before. They go out with friends, travel with friends (I've ridden the bus/subway with friends in wheelchairs several times -- it would be super awkward if they had to take a separate car), they might be running late for something, they decide they want to stop at a bar after work, or spontaneously run a few errands during a free moment. While paratransit may be very useful for some people (very sick, the elderly, patients with dementia, etc) it would be downright weird for an otherwise healthy and active person who's simply unable to use stairs.
Above and beyond that, accessibility doesn't just help the disabled. The author referenced this article: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_curb_cut_effect about curb cuts becoming widespread, which ended up being a tremendous help to people who were ablebodied, as well. My relatives come to visit Boston, and both my mother and grandmother have different forms of severe arthritis. For about a year after her hip surgery, my mom had to walk with a cane -- we took the elevators at every subway stop. We did the same when my grandparents were in town. I had a bad ankle sprain a few years ago and also had to use the elevators. You see a lot of people with strollers, luggage, several small children in tow during rush hour -- elevators are a huge benefit.
As a healthy, young, ablebodied person, I would never ever want the accessibility of public transport to go away in favor of "stairs for the normies" and "taxi vouchers/cash for people in wheelchairs." It's frankly a terrible plan that benefits no one.
[1] https://tfl.gov.uk/transport-accessibility/wheelchair-access...
OK, it'll be many decades before every station is fully accessible at that rate. But progress is being made. The Tube is infrastructure which will likely still be around for decades or centuries to come, so it's worth doing.
TfL's online status tools and journey planner are also pretty good at keeping track of any lift outages, etc, so it's unlikely anyone will turn up to a station to find a broken lift unexpectedly.
The speed of the upgrade programme was reduced by Johnstone, but is progressing. The three disabled people I know, have organized most of their lives around the parts that have already been upgraded or other transport methods (DLR, trams in Croydon) but still very much appreciate the improvements as they are made to the Underground.
I like the approach of sharing some data / statistics; but it would be nice if we could combine the two. The saturated humor when combined with the real information might make more of an impact.
> On average, 25 elevators a day stop working
Do 27% of elevators really break down on a _daily_ basis? That is abysmal if accurate.
It's important to remember that a lot of the stations, in Lower Manhattan especially, are way too small (4-5 foot wide platforms with 2 stairwells). I don't see elevators happening at those stations. A lot of these smaller platforms are connected other small platforms via stairs (think Canal Street - JZQNR6).
Good luck if your stop is on a bridge in Brooklyn or Queens.
Don't discount the latter, so much easier for parents to use the subway that way.
It totally can be done. The US carved off a slice of every sidewalk to allow for ramps for wheelchairs, nationwide.
though i can understand need for them in China where people even refill their bottles in IKEA at self serving driving machines, but one would think that Americans are more honest
I really think it would be orders of magnitude more cost effective for the government to pay for disabled persons cab fares than to make public transit accessible. Has anyone run the numbers?
Paying them for time lost in traffic seems like it's going too far. After all, its not the taxpayers fault they are in a wheelchair. We don't need to compensate them.
There is no reason to imagine that compensating those not using it (for any reason, be it disability or in a niche area in the city, or simply unwilling) would be a part of the goal of providing public transportation.
It is not a gift to the people from bottom of the government's heart, that they would try to offer an alternative gift to those unable or unwilling to partake in this wonderful service.
Beside our reputation, we're a friendly bunch here.
My wife and I helped a man in a wheelchair up some stairs in Brooklyn, since his alternative was taking the train about five stops down to an elevator-equipped station, then getting on a bus, and coming right back. At that time of night, we optimistically estimated an hour for him to do so... or about 60 seconds for us to carry him up.
That being said, I see fairly high numbers of deaths in general, mainly attributed to suicides and alcohol/drug use.
How would this barrier work? Would it withdraw once the train pulled up or something?
Furthermore, platform doors require you to have trains that have the doors in the same positions on the car body, which much of the newer subway fleet (R142,R188 & R143,R160,R179) has but the legacy fleet does not. This issue get compounded even more where multiple lines intersect (which is often due to the NYC subway's unique connectedness) requiring that certain stations would need to support 3 or 4 different car classes.
I'm not sure how many ads you have to sell to recoup the cost, but it's probably a lot.
> on the order of >$1M per platform
That's insanity! Over $1M for something every amusement park has for every ride? Lemme guess, these one have to be engineered to the point of 'impossible to fail' and installed by the employees of municipal cronies at 3x fair wages?
Talk about perfect being the enemy of good...
It needs multiple sensors that can handle being exposed to a lot of wear and tear. It needs to operate for years on end with, ideally, very little maintenance. It has to endure being buffeted by the forces of the train entering and leaving the station which exerts significant strain on any hinges or track mechanisms.
So you need a pair of these for each set of doors on the train, and if each car has three doors, and you have eight cars, that's 48 doors.
That leaves you with only $20,800 per door. You still need to build the walls themselves and you need to have this installed by the right technicians.
Do the math, don't bitch just because it sounds expensive.
The door must detect a 1-2cm obstruction (e.g. fingers, child's wrist) and be sufficiently weak that a child can pull their hand/wrist free. The door must not prevent a train from departing if only a hem of a skirt/trousers/coat is trapped. They must be strong enough to prevent anyone falling from the train while it is in motion, and must not be able to be forced open between stations.
Otherwise, approximately one person per year will die.
How much would you charge, to make doors to this specification?
And, some time in the next five years, an accident will happen, somewhere in the world. Your next door will need to prevent that situation, too.
[This is the situation in "wealthier" Europe, where it's pretty difficult to die on a train. Other countries may vary.]
If the padding is too squashy, a trapped hand won't be detected and the person could be dragged under the train. Too sensitive, and someone leaning a suitcase on the door prevents the train from leaving.
But really, you don't even need a door - a simple gate like on a ride at Disneyland, or heck even the gates at the station entrance would do nicely.
https://alicegordenker.wordpress.com/2012/01/17/subway-safet...
(not my article)
They also have the added benefit of showing people where to line up and make it harder for someone to cause the train to be late by rushing/holding the door
When I lived in Tokyo, they put platform guard walls in at many stations. They were about chest high and had sets of doors that would open before the train doors opened, and if we had them in NYC, both of those folks would have made it home without an incident.
There is no record of anyone being killed or severely injured through overcrowding.
that's probably the ideal solution, but not practical for New York because the system was never designed with precision stopping points on the platform in mind. there's a margin of error that is at least a meter or so in either direction right now.
There are no "platform edge curtain" doors on other lines, even though many other lines also have computer controlled trains. (The "driver" is still there to press a button to start the train, but many lines almost drive themselves.) Although, even on the fully manual lines, the driver is expected to stop the train precisely -- the platforms aren't long enough for inaccuracy.
It won't kill the trains but slow them down considerably and of course if it's a last second jumper or someone who falls right as the train is entering the station it won't work. But I imagine it will help solve a majority of the issues.
If you're nervous for your safety then I would recommend to stand on the far end of the platform where the front of the train stops at the station.
[1] http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/mta-testing-systems-save...
As much as it's a feel-good measure, there is no conceivable way to justify the incredible expense of platform doors for such a small number of instances.
And the dirty secret is most of those are suicides. If they can't kill themselves on a train, they'll just go to the nearest bridge.
This is a quibble in this context, but it's an important issue in others (such as access to guns):
Suicide is an impulsive act. The less "convenient" it is to kill oneself, the fewer suicides there are. A extra few minutes to reconsider can often be lifesaving.
This is well-researched (and still fun) podcast where I learned about this: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/guns/
That's not true. Method substitution takes years.
However, when you consider the millions that ride the Subway each day and the hundreds of millions each year it's a very small number.
Cars create more deaths per capita I believe.
I don't have a good reference at the moment but from what I understand, most of it comes down to it being much harder to retrofit that kind of thing on to a 100+-year-old system than it is to build it into a new system. More specifically, since nothing was built with that in mind there are all kinds of challenges that would be very expensive to address like not all platforms are level or straight (imagine the cost and disruption involved in expanding and rebuilding the 4/5/6 platform and tunnels at Union Station to make them straight) and not all trains have doors that align in the same places (different generations of trains in service at the same time, different designs of trains on different lines, etc).
None of this means it can't or shouldn't be addressed eventually, but like many things in life there are reasons things aren't "just done" and it's important to understand those reasons if you want to make change happen.
The MTA overall is pretty fiscally responsible (im sure you can always find more waste to cut, but that's true of any organization) but is sadly overly reliant on debt to fund its capital program because the city, state and federal no longer really fund transit. This has lead to to about 15-20% of its operational budget to be dedicated to debt service, ie. money not being used for actual transit operation. Furthermore each year the money from the various emergency and rainy day funds in the operational budge that are not spent, are used to make additional contributions (above what is already budgeted each year) to the various befit and pensions obligations.
Unfortunately this good fiscal responsibility also means that the governor can screw the MTA out 65 million $ and get away with it because they can manage the loss. http://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/03/14/state-assembly-wants-t...
That's a static fee to go anywhere. In the Bay Area, your BART ticket fee is dependent on where you want to go--at it's most extreme, can be up to $20/ride.
$2.75-$3 to get anywhere in NYC is an absolute bargain.
http://www.citylab.com/navigator/2015/09/a-man-rode-the-long...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/nyregion/mta-subway-bus-t...
Considering you don't have to own a car if you live in NYC, $130/month is a real bargain and about the only thing in this city that is affordable.
425 stations total 92 stations accessible
Boston has 53 stations, with "90% wheelchair accessible", sounds like 48 to me.
So "lousy" NYC has almost double the number of wheelchair accessible stations as "great" Boston, and 8 times the total number of stations.
Sadly, retrofitting more elevators into existing stations, especially many of the smaller ones, is a tough sell. It would at least be nice if they could do a better job of maintaining them and keeping track of the ones that are down and what the best alternative route is.
And the program, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, to provide discounted van service, is probably much better, considering the challenge of getting to and between stations when disabled.
That's comparing apples to watermelons.
Boston has a population of 650,000; New York, 8.5 million. So in Boston there is one accessible station per 13,500 residents. In New York, one per 92,400 residents. (The total residents per station is much more comparable, at 12.2k and 20k respectively).
This suggests that a more like-for-like basis, New York is roughly 4 to 7 times less accessible than Boston.
Edit: Actually, here's a better way to think about it, which does work a bit more in New York's favor. A variant of Metcalfe's law[1] applies to transport networks, in that the utility of a network is proportional to the total number of journeys that can be taken within it. So Boston has (48^2 - 48)/2 = 1,128 accessible origin/destination pairs, while NYC has 4,186 O/D pairs. So 1.73 accessible O/D pairs per thousand residents in Boston, versus 0.49 in New York.
For an able-bodied resident, Boston provides 2.12 trips per thousand residents, 10.6 trips per thousand residents for NYC. So if you're not in a wheelchair, then NYC is five times better than Boston. But if you are in a wheelchair, then NYC is 3.5 times worse.
I'm not sure how valid that is though, since at least for the NYC area, that MSA population is for the tri-state area, which is served by a number of other rail lines, and the majority of which isn't directly accessible to the NYC MTA system that those numbers are for. I don't know as much about the Boston area, but seems like a fair guess that those 5M people mostly don't have direct access to the Boston city transit, and may or may not be served by various other transit systems. Can any Bostonians confirm or deny?
The story is rather complicated. Boston's subway system serves a population of around 2 million, including administratively separate cities like Somerville, Cambridge, Brookline and Newton that are more like boroughs than separate cities. The rest is served by the commuter rail system and bus system, which do a good job of covering most people (probably about 4 million of 5 million).
There's actually 145 subway stations (though that includes a few underground stations on the silver line, technically BRT for now), but the article didn't the green line (America's first subway, 1898), because it's a "light rail" subway, not a "heavy rail" subway. Those stations all got retrofitted with wheelchair access or else were already above ground stations with access.
It's fair to say that those 145 stations serve about 1/4 the population of the MTA in New York.