Accessibility 'Deserts' Strand Disabled NYC Straphangers: Report

NEW YORK, NY — New York City's vast subway system stretches into more than 100 neighborhoods, but disabled riders in about half of them are left stranded, a new city comptroller's report says. Sixty-two of the 122 neighborhoods with subway stops lack a single station considered accessible to people with disabilities, making it tougher for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers to get around, the report released Tuesday found.

"For every inaccessible station, there is a New Yorker who can’t get to work, pick up their children from daycare, or visit their doctors," Comptroller Scott Stringer, a Democrat, said in a statement. "It’s simple — a person's livelihood should not be dictated by their mobility status, and we must take action immediately to address this crisis."

About 640,000 seniors, mobility-impaired people and kids younger than 5 live in those accessibility "deserts" with "severely restricted" subway access for the disabled, the report says.

The comptroller's report cited data from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Department of City Planning and the U.S. Census Bureau, as well as a 2017 report from the advocacy group TransitCenter.

The accessibility deserts are most concentrated in the outer boroughs, the comptroller's report says. There's not a single accessible station in 68 percent of neighborhoods served by the subway in Brooklyn, 59 percent in the Bronx and 43 percent in Queens, while the figure for Manhattan is just 26 percent, according to the report.

Neighorhoods with accessible stops host more than four times as many jobs as those without them, the report says. It's tough for mobility-impaired people in accessibility deserts to get to the roughly 2.7 million jobs in neighborhoods with accessible stations, the report says, making existing employment struggles for the disabled even worse.

But living near accessible stations comes with a price — the median rent in neighborhoods with at least one is $105 more than in those with none, the report found. Those higher rents can be "prohibitive" for families with kids and the disabled, injured and elderly, who already face steep expenses for medical care and other services, the report says.

Only a quarter of the subway system's 472 stations are currently accessible to disabled riders. Fixes to make 25 more stops accessible are currently underway, the MTA said.

Andy Byford, the New York City Transit president, unveiled a subway overhaul plan in May that would make more than 50 stations accessible in its first five years so riders are never more than two stations away from an accessible stop. Byford also hired Alex Elegudin, an accessibility advocate who uses a wheelchair, as his agency's first-ever senior adviser for systemwide accessibility.

The agency is also strengthening its "completely accessible" bus system and overhauling its Access-A-Ride paratransit service, MTA spokesman Shams Tarek said.

"New York City Transit has never been more committed to an accessible transit system than it is right now," Tarek said in a statement.

But questions over how to fund Byford's sweeping multibillion-dollar plan, dubbed Fast Forward, have given it an uncertain future. Congestion pricing, a proposal to toll cars entering central and lower Manhattan to fund the MTA, has been embraced by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who controls the MTA, but not all state legislators.

Stringer's report recommends the state Legislature introduce and set a referendum for an $8 billion "Transit Bond Act" that would fund improvements including a "significant investment" in accessibility upgrades. Voters approved a similar measure in 2005 that generated $3.5 billion, the report says.

"With these dollars in place, the MTA can dramatically enhance the reach of the subway system and improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers," the report reads.

Tarek declined to comment on the bond act proposal.

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