I highly suspect it is plain cheaper (and more convenient) to just subsidize private car rides for disabled people than making entire transit infrastructure in huge city to account for them.
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.
Remember that it's not just people in wheelchairs who benefit from accessibility though. The elderly, injured infirm, people with small children etc. also find accessibility helpful.
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.
I had very minor foot surgery recently and the first time I went to use the subway it dawned on my how none of my regular stops have elevators. My journey was slow and painful and this was just for a few weeks. I can't imagine having to deal with this frustration daily, even to the point of needing to find an apartment and a job near stops that are accessible.
I think grandparent comment's point was that at some point, greater good for disabled people can be delivered by specifically helping them rather than re-engineering the world to fit them. Considering that each has a concrete price tag attached to it.
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.
In Finland, everything is wheelchair-friendly from our Helsinki metro, to trains, to buses. I am kinda shocked to read Americans think it's not important to allocate the money to enable those with limitations to live their lives as freely as they, the able-bodied do. The mentality "it does not apply to me, why should I fine two fucks?" is all too common in the American ethos. Quite pathetic really.
The Helsinki Metro was built in 1982 and has 17 stations, of which 6 are underground. The New York City subway system has 472 stations, almost all of which are either underground or above grade. It was first opened in 1904. The difference in cost and complexity of providing universally accessible service is massive.
The thing with accessibility elevators is it just not people in wheel chair that benefit from them. Elderly people, people that have sports injury and can't climb stairs, having groceries, or kids and strollers etc, etc...
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.
They conditions in station elevators are usually such that I could not imagine using one if it wasn't physically required.
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.
dirty elevator is still better than no elevator is you ask me, one can't be too picky if one wanna get to some place
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
> "I highly suspect it is plain cheaper (and more convenient) to just subsidize private car rides for disabled people"
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.
ParaTransit specifically is a non-profit organization. "Non-profit" and "incentives" generally don't mix well. Better service would require paying market rates - by the city, or partly by the city.
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.
ParaTransit does not operate vehicles themselves - ParaTransit is simply a program that purchases these services from private, for-profit operators (like, say, Uber), and manages eligibility checks as well as payment to providers for rides delivered.
> "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.
> The small size of the customer base also means drivers spend much more time than usual traveling to a pickup.
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.
Did you happen to read the paragraph above the one you quoted:
> 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.
Plain cheaper, sure. But the government isn't a for-profit corporation. One of the central policy themes of the last few decades is increasing inclusivity, that the mainstreaming of marginalized people isn't solely for their direct benefit but also to increase their visibility in the eyes of the majority and as such build awareness and empathy.
> Plain cheaper, sure. But the government isn't a for-profit corporation.
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 don't want this to come off as harsh but it's a huge city with lots of money that has a pretty large disabled community. They've been really slow upgrading their train stations but their lack of action doesn't make it OK to never fix the problem.
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.
physical disability affecting ability to walk upstairs and downstairs? i doubt that
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
Subway infrastructure should probably target a useful life of 100 years. Over that time, demographics will shift to an older population even as city population increases. It may look cheaper to skip improvements now, but long term I doubt it is the same calculation.
I don't think I buy this as a viable alternative. The first problem that pops into my head is transportation for disabled people who are visiting the city or that commute in for whatever reason. Providing them access to the disabled-taxi-program is problematic.
This is literally how it works - except it's paid for directly by the city government, rather than an expense-reimbursement situation.
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.
it's not really just disabled people, actually they are pretty irrelevant group compared to families with children in stroller and elderly, you will understand this once you will have child, that while until then you thought all those ramps everywhere are useless for those few disabled people there are tons of parents work children in strollers, heck i would say majority of population is dealing with this at least once in life, so good luck subsidizing these people
When people think of better solutions, regulations often change.
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.
I have reason to believe that you're not only wrong, but that giving up on making public transportation accessible in favor of paratransit would be a huge detriment to everyone, especially the disabled.
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.
It's the same situation in London, only about 25% of Underground stations are accessible[1]. This seems to be the cost of old infrastructure - when most of the network was built, accessibility simply wasn't a consideration. Neither was having a decent mobile signal, or air conditioning. Fortunately, we've learned from this and newer systems like the ones in Shanghai and Taiwan seem to be far more accessible.
Progress is being made, however. Stations are currently being retrofitted for step-free acccess at the rate of around 30 stations every 5 years.
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.
For mobile signal, TfL wanted more money and better cooperation than the mobile networks were willing to provide.
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.
I don't see too many elevators and hopefully it gets fixed with the push the governor is making towards modernizing stations across NYC.
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.
If it's anything like older elevators anywhere else, there's probably a lack of proper parts for repairs and lack of interest in spending money to replace the old elevator with a modern one, not to mention the difficulty in finding people who are able to actually work on the old equipment.
Same in Paris, we just vacationed there for five days, with a two year old. Very difficult to navigate in a stroller (good proxy for a wheelchair - I can lift it down the stairs, but my wife cannot alone). However, there it's quite a difficult problem to solve (I recognize) because a lot of the transfers between different stations are a bunch of underground hallways with staircases in all directions, so it's not simply enough to add elevators from the stations to platform level.
In Paris, the accessible stations are indicated on the maps. While that doesn't fix the accessibility issue, it can help a little bit with finding alternate stations.
It's certainly past time that some tiny fraction of the billions of dollars spent on accessibility were spent subsidizing modes of travel that don't require such bland and dehumanized environs. Elevators on medium-sized buildings (and subways) are a nuisance, in that they make most of the population less healthy in exchange for 0.7% of the population being able to explore every nook. If the law hadn't cemented handicapped rights to use dated technology, many people already would be using something capable of climbing stairs. Yes, that "something" would probably cost more than a wheelchair that could have been manufactured in 1950. Since the mobility of the handicapped is in society's interest, society can subsidize it, rather than mandating that brick-and-mortar businesses do so.
This is true. For example, carrying an apartment's worth of furniture up to the 7th floor will drastically improve your cardiovascular health. Or kill you.
Your might not be from the US, so I can understand how you might have such an impression, but wheelchair ramps, although universal for new construction, are usually not installed until either new construction occurs nearby or the sidewalk itself needs to be replaced unless a high traffic street. For example, although I think the installation of wheelchair ramps on sidewalks has been going on for at least 30 years, probably only about half of the curbs in my relatively-urban neighborhood have ramps.
It's simpler in Vienna though because they have a proof of payment system. You just need one elevator to the platform. In NY, you need one to the turnstiles, and then another one to the platform.
why they use actually turnstiles in NY? seem very inefficient on par with jams i experienced in Beijing which user them too
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
Given that 1 in 10,000 people in NYC are in wheelchairs,
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?
Would there also be interest paid for time lost in traffic? New York roads are tight and always busy, something the public transit system is supposed to workaround.
Public transport is supposed to alleviate congestion on the road. That there exists those unwilling or unable to make use of it is irrelevant, so long as a sufficient percentage of the driving population can and do use it over driving themselves.
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.
I think free fare and door to door service would be pretty good already.
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.
You carry the buggy up the stairs together and if you're on your own a stranger will help you. It's very common to see this (and to help people when you see they need help) in NYC.
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.
When we were in Paris last year my girlfriend broke her foot and I had to push her around in a wheelchair. It's a real pain to see that some elevator is not working and you have to walk half a mile to find the next one. Since then I have much more respect for people who have to deal with this every day.
It runs 24 hours and extensively covers 4 of the 5 boroughs. Yes, it's dirty, but the coverage + availability is what makes it a great system - it's certainly unparalleled in the Western hemisphere. Everytime I go to San Francisco I realize how awesome the NYC subway really is.
They look into it every few years but so far the costs to do so have been astronomical so it doesn't go past studies.
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.
6 people died from being struck by trains in a year (I think that was 2015 they pushed in their advertisements). There were about 1.76 billion rides in the same period.
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.
> 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.
Platform doors are not just for preventing falls onto the right of way, they also help to reduce litter, reduce delays due trains coming into stations slowly because of overcrowding and allow stations to be air conditioning.
Do you have a source for how often this happens? I can't find anything specifically about subway pushers in NYC. As far as I can tell, it's a very rare occurrence.
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?
Anecdotally: last year I was riding in a train that hit someone who fell onto the tracks because the platform was so crowded. 30 minutes later, one station away, a woman lost both her legs when a train ran them over.
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.
In London, they simply close the station entrances (at street level) before it becomes so overcrowded. It can be a daily occurrence, e.g. at rush hour during a month of upgrade work on a particular line.
There is no record of anyone being killed or severely injured through overcrowding.
There are numerous examples on the Tokyo Metro/Toei. The cheaper ones go up to about chest height and the more expensive ones completely block off the tracks by going up to the ceiling.
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
The MTA is currently working on a solution that doesn't use barriers. [1] The short of it is that it will use thermal cameras and other sensors to determine if a human (and not a rat, for instance) has entered the tracks and is in danger.
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.
have you ever seen the tube system in London? it's a fully blocking barrier with a set of sliding doors that lines up precisely with the doors of the train cars when they pull in to the station.
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.
Only on new lines with straight platforms. Older ones are almost all on curves, a guy in the sliding doors business told me they looked into but the cost was too high as each station is on a different circumference bend so they would all be custom jobs.
Only on the newest part of the newest line, the Jubilee Line Extension. (1999? something like that.)
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.
They investigated installing them here (Toronto) but the cost per station is pretty high, on the order of >$1M per platform. When you multiply that across a system as large as NYC that's easily half a billion dollars.
I'm not sure how many ads you have to sell to recoup the cost, but it's probably a lot.
edit - thought we were still talking about a simple low wall or gate, not the floor to ceiling glass in the GP post. leaving below for posterity..
> 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?
Insanity? That's dirt cheap. Think about how much mechanical complexity goes into each door, how it has multiple motors, servos, linear actuators and such. It has to be safe when closed, and it has to be safe when opened, it can't spontaneously shut in someone's face or pin them in the middle.
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.
It occurs to one that elevator doors are every bit as complex as what you ecan scribe and have been doing their job for over half a century at a cost of far less than that.
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.
Sorry, but $20K per door is still ridiculous. This is not new technology, automatically operated doors are used in many different settings. It's pure gov't waste to pay that much. It would be wasteful if it was 1/4 that much.
As an example that most automatic doors don't have to deal with, but is essential for railways:
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.]
The first part just means they need to have rubber padding. Still expensive since the design it's a one time job and can be reused for trains, trams, buses etc.
It's not that simple. Something different is required depending how the doors close (pneumatic, electric) and the expected use (high / low speed, crowded or not).
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.
I think it's crazy that the MTA hasn't already done this. Not only would it save a lot of lives, but it would also allow the platform to be climate controlled. You have no idea how many times I've sat there underground for 30+ minutes in sub-freezing or 100+ degree heat.
So we also have to pay for new HVAC systems on almost five hundred commercial buildings (that's what they are, even if underground) with no space for them? Cool.
Platform doors are generally installed when you install modern signalling (CBTC) onto a line, which much of the NYC subway does not have. CBTC equipped trains can operate under Automatic Train Operation (ATO) meaning that trains can be made to always stop at the same location on the platform.
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.
You could have "service stations" where people who want to do service aka do good could go. Wheel chair people could wait there for someone who was going to ride the subway anyway to walk past and, wanting to do good in the world, help the disabled person get on.
I remember reading the news story about the author's accident. Very interesting/sobering to read about life since then. More on topic, I'm considering a move to NYC and the thought of navigating the city with young kids is almost stressful itself.
It's still a bargain. Especially if you're out there a ways. A single price for everyone is especially nice when you consider many systems charge you based on distance. So people in "less desirable" or central locations (who often have less money) have to pay more.
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.
As someone who recently moved to NYC from the SF Bay Area, it's a pleasure to swipe for a ride, even at $3.
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.
The maximum one-way fare on BART is ~$15 and that's if you're going between OAK and SFO (which I imagine is very uncommon). Non-airport rides max out at under $8
The MTA actually doesn't run a deficit, both their operational and capital budgets are fully funded.
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.
The new rates took effect on March 19, actually. The single-ride fare remains $2.75, but the monthly and weekly fares increased, while MetroCard fare bonuses were decreased.
This article paints a pretty negative view of it, but looking at the numbers, that might not be the case:
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.
> So "lousy" NYC has almost double the number of wheelchair accessible stations as "great" Boston, and 8 times the total number of stations.
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.
Thanks, that's an interesting calculation, and I didn't take population into account. The 650k to 8.5M sounds like a higher ratio than I'd expect though. If we take the MSA from rrdharan's post, NYC metro population is 4x greater rather than 13x with your numbers. If we use those numbers, then we'd get accessible pairs per thousand residents of 0.2093 for NYC, and 0.2256 for Boston, which makes Boston about 8% better.
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.
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.