MTA's Long History Of Being Sued Over Subway Accessibility

In January 2019, a 22-year-old woman died after falling down the stairs of a midtown Manhattan subway station. Malaysia Goodson had been carrying a stroller and her 1-year-old daughter down to the platform of the 7th Avenue and 53rd Street station, which lacks an elevator.

Her death dramatically highlighted the grim reality endured by parents, caregivers, elderly, and the disabled alike: The vast majority of the 472 subway stations in New York are inaccessible—and much of the MTA’s current accessibility policies have been crafted under duress as the agency has been sued time and time again.

Disabilities rights advocates say New York City’s subway system fares poorly when compared to the metro systems of San Francisco and Washington D.C. which are considered fully accessible to riders using wheelchairs.

In contrast, only 120 stations out of the 472 in the city are currently accessible, forcing wheelchair users and others who need accessible stations to come up with hacks and workarounds that can add hours to their weekly commutes.

The MTA's current capital plan includes funding for elevators at 25 more stations. Last year, the agency unveiled a $51.5 billion capital plan that includes key accessibility improvements for 70 stations.

"The MTA is fully committed to system-wide accessibility as evidenced by our unprecedented $5.5 billion investment in 70 new accessible stations, exceeding our goal of ensuring our customers are never more than two stops away from an ADA station," said agency spokesman Andrei Berman in a statement. "These surveys show the exhaustive study and careful consideration that are going into assessing stations for accessibility upgrades, as we work diligently to invest in our system – with the largest number of stations in the world – and deliver for our more than 5.7 million daily customers.”

However, advocates who want a faster response from the agency have turned to litigation to force the MTA to respond. The linchpin for the accessibility lawsuits is the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990—while the ADA requires the MTA to make stations accessible any time it does a renovation that affects the usability of a station “regardless of cost,” the law also includes a caveat that it has to be “technically feasible.”

The MTA has used that caveat to argue against undertaking accessibility renovations that would have disproportionately added to the cost of the project.

But an important benchmark happened last year when the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York ruled that any substantial MTA renovations in stations automatically “triggered accessibility obligations under the Americans with Disabilities Act, no matter how much those accessibility improvements cost. The ruling casts a spotlight on the MTA’s practice of not installing elevators when it makes renovations to subway stations,” according to the Disability Rights Advocates [DRA] non-profit legal center.

That ruling happened in the Bronx Independent Living Services lawsuit that the DRA filed in 2016 over the MTA's failure to install an elevator while the agency rehabbed the Middletown Road subway station in the Bronx. The seven-month-long $21.85 million renovations included replacing staircases, steel framing, ceilings, walls, track structure—extensive work that should have included adding more accessible features, the DRA said.

The MTA said the biggest issues in improving accessibility typically involve the engineering challenges of situating elevators into existing stations—most of which are at least 75 years old—rather than the cost of the elevators themselves. The lawsuit over the Middletown Road subway station is still in litigation with the MTA saying it is technically infeasible to put in an elevator at that station, according to the DRA.

Elevators in a few New York stations have existed as far back as the early 1900s, with lifts built in the Washington Heights stations for 168th Street, 181th Street, and 191th Street stations on the 1 line, and 181th Street and 190th Street on the A line.

But the push to make the entire subway system more accessible began in earnest starting in the 1980s, when Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association (now known as United Spinal Association) sued the MTA to force a $150 million modernization program for about 50 stations to include more access for riders with disabilities.

Back then, former MTA chair Richard Ravitch said making the subway system more accessible would be a waste of money to benefit relatively few passengers. The New York Times reported: “the M.T.A. chairman predicted few people in wheelchairs would use the elevators. With 1,300 wheelchair-equipped buses now operating on 44 routes, he said, only 10 to 20 people in wheelchairs use the buses each day. In addition the experience in other cities with accessible subway systems suggests low use. Mr. Ravitch cited these numbers: San Francisco, 85 wheelchair passengers a day; Washington, 29, and Atlanta, 5.”

In 1984, former Mayor Ed Koch even blocked an agreement hammered out under the terms of the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association lawsuit to build more elevators in the stations. ''I would recommend,'' Koch said in the New York Times, ''that instead of installing elevators in its subways, the M.T.A. should immediately commence the development of a paratransit system.''

''To spend millions for elevators to satisfy a principle of station accessibility for the handicapped and yet not provide any real help for the handicapped, is very poor public policy," Koch added. "I cannot accept it.''

Koch eventually acquiesced and in an agreement with then-Governor Mario Cuomo, ten more stations in the city had elevator access by 1991.

Given the slow pace of accessibility upgrades, piecemeal lawsuits have been leveraged to improve individual stations: in 2011, a DRA lawsuit settlement resulted in the installation of an elevator at the Dyckman Street subway station.

To force a broader shift in policy, the DRA has filed two lawsuits against the MTA in 2017—a class action suit that also named NYC Transit Authority and New York City as defendants, saying the failure to make the subways programmatically accessible was discriminatory. The second suit was against the MTA and NYCTA for failure to maintain the existing subway station elevators— “on average, there are approximately 25 elevator outages per day, with median outage lasting four hours and with many outages lasting for months at a time."

The last piece of the DRA’s strategy is the Forsee v. MTA lawsuit filed in May, where the suit charges that the MTA is illegally benefiting only passengers who use stairs when major renovations are planned.

Michelle Caiola, the DRA's Managing Director for Litigation, said thanks to increased activism and former NYC Transit president Andy Byford's focus on accessibility, there's been an attitude shift in recent years since the Koch administration. "It’s going to be hard for them to put the genie back in the bottle. I think we're finally moving towards more accessibility," she said. "But they are still fighting us.”

“It feels like they were just flouting the law, and they didn't take it seriously,” she said of the MTA’s historic reluctance to address accessibility issues. “And you know, until their feet are put to the fire and a judge weighs in, it seems like they would continue to.”

The MTA could not come up with a ballpark figure on how much the agency has spent on accessibility lawsuits, but advocates have pointed out that the agency relies on the white-shoe law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP to respond to the lawsuits.

“Why, when [the MTA is] saying they want [accessibility] to be a future goal, then why not come to an agreement?" Caiola wondered. "Why not then put all this money towards that rather than fighting?”

With reporting from Annie Todd