« N.Y. may ban youths' out-of-state shock therapy | Main | State sending more disabled students away »
March 22, 2006
Stairways to Nowhere: Handicapped subway riders suffer from too-little access
For hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, the impossibility of navigating the city’s subway system is an all-too familiar experience. While 11 percent of the system’s stations are wheelchair accessible, repairs and rerouting make the system torturous for the disabled—like poor Charlie riding the MTA in the old song, they can get on but not off. And there is no magic wand in sight: the MTA’s capital budget calls for an expenditure of $192 million for wheelchair accessibility in the 2005-2009 fiscal period, which will create only 15 more handicapped-accessible subway stations.
...Even die-hard advocates for the disabled, such as Michael Harris, campaign coordinator for the Disabled Riders Coalition, acknowledge the difficulties the MTA is facing. “Every elevator must be custom built,” he says, a situation arising from the unpredictable architecture of the stations, and the fact the builders never anticipated that elevators would be retro-fitted a century later. Harris, who is wheelchair-bound himself, describes the process by which the MTA started on the road to handicapped accessibility as a long one. Initially, the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans filed suit against the MTA in 1979. A consent decree issued in 1984 mandated that a hundred key stations be handicapped-accessible by 2020.
Posted by Michelle at March 22, 2006 10:32 PM