Elevators Open At Astoria Boulevard Subway Station

ASTORIA, QUEENS — The MTA finished construction Friday on a new set of elevators at the Astoria Boulevard subway station, several months ahead of schedule.

The elevators — two carrying commuters between the street and the mezzanine level, and another two running between the mezzanine and the station platform — were scheduled to be finished in the fall, but the MTA accelerated the project's construction work after ridership plummeted due to the the coronavirus pandemic.

The elevators' opening makes Astoria Boulevard the first N/W subway station in Astoria to become fully compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, which celebrated its 30th anniversary Sunday.

“When we talk about modernizing mass transit, it’s not just about better signals and newer train cars,” Sarah Feinberg, interim president of MTA New York City Transit, said. “It’s about making sure all of our customers can use the system with ease."

As we commemorate the 30th Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, we’re celebrating progress in making the subway more accessible to everyone.

On Friday the Astoria Blvd N/W became fully accessible.
By early August, 3 more stations will join the list. https://t.co/JCiTLVigN7
— MTA. Wear a Mask. Stop the Spread. (@MTA) July 27, 2020

The Astoria Boulevard station closed in March 2019 to enable workers to raise the height of the station to prevent trucks from hitting infrastructure underneath it, install the four elevators and build new staircases.

It reopened to commuters in December, though the elevators were still under construction.

The Broadway N/W and the Steinway Street M/R stations are among 70 subway stations slated to get ADA-compliant elevators under the MTA's 2020-2024 capital plan, ensuring that riders are never more than two stations away from an ADA-compliant station.

But transit officials say the agency will need emergency federal funding to make that reality.

"All that is somewhat in question," MTA Chief Development Officer Janno Lieber said Monday.

The MTA also recently renovated the N/W stations at 30th Avenue, 36th Avenue, 39 Avenue-Dutch Kills and Broadway as part of Gov. Andrew Cuomo's enhanced station initiative, but those overhauls didn't include elevators, drawing criticism from riders and transit advocates who criticized the work as overly focused on aesthetics.

In a news conference Monday, Alex Elegudin, MTA New York City Transit's senior advisor for systemwide accessibility, defended that decision.

"If we spend funds making several stations accessible in a row, those are funds that now we are not able to use, for example, to do other stations in Queens, or other stations in Brooklyn, so we are very strategic about how we select stations," Elegudin said. "If we just selected stations based on wherever ones might be getting a little work or something else, you'd have a really mixed-bag system."