NEW YORK — New Yorkers with disabilities have reached a settlement with the MTA in a nearly decade-long fight to make the subways accessible to everyone.
The tentative agreement, filed Wednesday in a long-running Manhattan Federal Court class-action lawsuit, outlines an action plan for the MTA and the city's Transit Authority to address elevator outages that render subway access difficult, if not impossible, for hundreds of thousands of people with mobility issues.
"Reliable elevator access is essential for people with disabilities to travel independently and participate fully in life across New York City," said Yaw Appiadu, the executive director of Harlem Independent Living Center, one of the plaintiffs. "This settlement represents meaningful progress toward greater accountability and a public transportation system that people with disabilities can use with the same confidence as other riders."
The agreement, which Manhattan Judge George Daniels must approve, requires the MTA to provide real-time updates on elevator outages, including estimates for how long they'll last, online and on information screens at stations and street-level signs. It also requires signage to be posted by broken elevators and throughout stations detailing alternative routes, how to contact an agent for help, and QR codes linking to accessibility updates.
Email and text alerts about accessibility elevators must also be provided to subscribers, per the terms of settlement.
MTA chairman Janno Lieber signed the proposed agreement in front of cameras in the agency's boardroom on Wednesday, seated next to Dr. Sharon McLennon Wier of the Center for Independence of the Disabled, one of the groups behind the suits.
"I do hope," Lieber said, "that more and more of our interactions between the MTA and the disability community can take place in conference rooms of collaboration rather than in courthouses of litigation."
Weir celebrated the agreement for meaningfully working to ensure a basic civil right is afforded to more than one quarter of the city's population.
"I think it's important to recognize that we all want to get to work, have fun, get to school — and the subway is the best way, the fastest way, to get there," Weir said. "We've struggled in trying to ensure that people with mobility disabilities, sensory disabilities, actually have the ability to get on a subway car."
The case filed by a coalition of disability rights organizations and New Yorkers who use wheelchairs in 2017 under the Americans with Disabilities Act took the MTA and the city's Transit Authority to task for hosting the highest public transportation usage in any U.S. metropolitan area while ranking last for accessibility.
It detailed how countless New Yorkers with mobility issues have been unable to freely, independently and safely commute to work and appointments or otherwise get around, with many left stranded on platforms due to unplanned and unannounced elevator outages.
Altering plans and missing appointments due to unannounced outages was par for the course for subway riders like Bronx man Dustin Jones and software engineer Sasha Blair-Goldensohn, two of the suit's plaintiffs, who on many occasions were put "in the dangerous and humiliating act" of asking strangers to carry both them and their wheelchair up or down stairs, the suit detailed.
Per the terms of the proposed settlement, all subway station agents will be required to undergo mandatory training on disability-related topics, like how to help people when elevators break, and MTA staff must acknowledge complaints within one business day.
The nearly decade-old case targeting stations with elevators was brought the same day as a separate suit targeting stations without any, which ultimately resulted in the MTA agreeing to install elevators in nearly all of the city's subway stations.
"This settlement hones in on the issues that can provide immediate relief to people with disabilities trying to navigate the complex system that is the MTA," Victoria Pilger, a staff attorney with another of the organizations behind the suit, Disability Rights Advocates, said in a statement.
"While we continue to work towards 95% of stations being accessible under the first agreement."
When the cases were filed, on a good day with no outages, only 112 out of 472 subway stations were wheelchair-accessible — and out of those, only 100 offered elevator service in both directions.
Presently, 161 stations are accessible, according to the MTA.