Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Rebecca Liebson

Some neighborhoods are worse than others. On the N train in Queens, there are seven stations in a row without a single elevator.

The transit agency has repeatedly come under fire and faced lawsuits for discriminating against disabled riders and for renovating stations without adding elevators.

Now subway officials are finally moving to make the system more welcoming. They plan to add elevators at 70 stations in the next five years — a stunning pledge of $5.5 billion, making it a top priority in the agency’s ambitious new spending plan.

One stop on the list is the Broadway station in Astoria, Queens, a neighborhood that has long been neglected when it comes to accessibility and is one station on the N train route without any elevators. Riders must climb a long staircase to reach the elevated platform at the century-old station.

“A lot of older people like myself can’t use this subway,” Myro Tsouratakis said as he walked by the station using a cane on a recent morning. “I can still make it up the steps, but it takes me a long time.”

Only about a quarter of New York City’s 472 subway stations are wheelchair accessible, one of the lowest percentages of any major transit system in the world. Other transit systems in Washington and San Francisco are fully accessible, and more than half of the stations in Chicago and Boston are accessible to people with disabilities.

A major obstacle in New York is the cost of upgrading stations across such a vast and aging system that first opened in 1904. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees the city’s subway and buses, estimates that accessibility fixes will cost about $78 million per station.

Transit advocates have criticized the high costs for installing elevators and have argued that the agency could build more if it could do the work for less.

“Given that New York has so many inaccessible stations, the MTA must figure out how to bring down the costs of individual projects,” said Colin Wright, a senior associate at TransitCenter, an advocacy group.

Each project can require adding two or three elevators — one to take riders to the mezzanine level where they pay the fare and one each for the platforms heading in opposite directions. Officials also frequently have to build new staircases, move utilities like gas and water lines and pay for real estate at the street level for the elevator.

“The elevator installation is really only 20% of the overall cost,” said Janno Lieber, the authority’s head of capital construction.

Still, subway leaders have said they want to bring down the costs and are looking to other cities for lessons. The cost of building elevators at train stations can vary widely — one project in the Boston area cost about $36 million and included three new elevators and two escalators. A new station in Chicago with four elevators cost $75 million.

In New York, a developer in lower Manhattan agreed to build two subway elevators, at a cost of about $10 million each, in exchange for being given permission to build a larger building.

Over the years, elected officials and transit leaders have repeatedly thwarted attempts to build subway elevators. Richard Ravitch, the former MTA chairman credited with turning around the subway in the 1980s, fought a push to add elevators, arguing that the costs would be “enormous and the benefits illusory.”

Ed Koch, the popular New York City mayor who died more than six years ago, blocked a deal to add elevators in 1984.

Ravitch and Koch favored creating a separate paratransit system using vans to carry disabled riders where they needed to go. That system, known as Access-A-Ride, began in 1990, but has been plagued by problems, including long waits, poor service and high costs.

The transit agency recently released a list of the 48 stations where it wants to tackle elevators first, including 21 in Brooklyn, 12 in Manhattan, six in the Bronx, six in Queens and three on the Staten Island Railway, a train line that serves the only borough the subway never reached.

Subway leaders said the goal was that no rider would be farther than two stops from an accessible station. They also prioritized transfer stations and those with high ridership.

“These 48 stations are a terrific first step and help get us closer than ever to achieving systemwide accessibility that all New Yorkers deserve,” Andy Byford, the subway leader, said.

Byford has made accessibility a top priority since he took over a year and a half ago. He hired Alex Elegudin, a wheelchair user, as the subway’s first accessibility chief. Byford has met with disabled riders, including joining a 6-year-old boy in a wheelchair for a tour of a bus depot.

But even when a station has an elevator, workers have struggled to keep them working properly. Only about 94% of elevators were available in August, according to the transit agency. The rate is worse for escalators — 87% were working, the worst performance in years.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat who controls the subway, has recently started to talk about making accessibility a priority. But one of the governor’s key plans to improve stations has been criticized by disability advocates for failing to add any elevators.

The more than $800 million plan, known as the Enhanced Station Initiative, aimed to give more than two dozen stations a makeover, but none received elevators. Instead, the stations got new tiles and LED lighting — part of a focus by Cuomo on aesthetics.

“It was a missed opportunity,” Wright said. “Those renovations signaled to riders with disabilities that they didn’t matter.”

A spokesman for Cuomo, Patrick Muncie, defended the enhanced station initiative as a way to “quickly rehabilitate stations that were in disrepair.” The governor’s commitment to accessibility was “clear and evident” through the state’s large contributions to the authority’s capital plans.

Subway officials also noted that the current capital plan, which runs from 2015 to 2019, includes installing 59 elevators at 25 stations.

The Broadway station in Astoria, which was part of Cuomo’s enhancement plan, was closed for months and reopened with sleek new benches and computer screens.

“They remodeled it and still they didn’t put an elevator here,” Marcia Cole said as she walked by the station using a cane. “That’s crazy.”

Andreas Kolmbaroulis, who also uses a cane, said he was glad the station was finally getting an elevator.

“Better late than never,” he said.

Disability advocates have pressed the transit agency for years to make the subway accessible. A lawsuit filed this year challenged the practice of renovating stations without installing elevators and argued that it violated the Americans with Disabilities Act, a 1990 federal law that prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities.

Subway officials say that it is too difficult to install elevators at some stations because of technical challenges.

Joseph G. Rappaport, executive director of the Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled, said the capital plan was “real progress.” But he called on officials to commit to a legally binding agreement to make sure they follow through on their promises.

“That’s the only way to ensure that this really happens,” he said. “You don’t know who is going to be Andy Byford’s successor.”

Parents with young children have also drawn attention to the elevator problem. Catherine Schoenfeld, a teacher who lives in Astoria, said she had avoided the Broadway station since her newborn son arrived. It is too difficult lugging his stroller up the stairs.

“I’m just going to have to get comfortable carrying the whole thing up the steps,” she said as she pushed her son in a stroller and wondered when the repairs would be done.

“He’ll probably be walking,” she said, “by the time they’re finished.”

This article originally appeared in

MTA Pledges $5 Billion for Subway Elevators. Guess How Many.

NEW YORK — Across large swaths of New York City, it is impossible to take the subway without using the stairs. People who rely on wheelchairs are simply out of luck.

The signal system is the invisible, unglamorous backbone of the subway, controlling when trains can move down the tracks. But the demands of a 21st-century ridership are being borne by archaic signal equipment, some of which dates to when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president.

Installing modern signals is fundamental to restoring the subway to a level of reliability that is vital to New York’s economic future.

The aging system’s importance was underscored last week when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said that it wanted to spend $7 billion to greatly expand the number of subway lines slated to get new signals.

It was a major moment for subway signals, and a remarkable shift from neglected piece of anonymous infrastructure to urgent priority for elected officials.

“Making signals a priority is a sea change for New York because it’s a shift from politicians wanting to do the big, shiny thing they can put their name on, to focusing on the things that actually matter most,” said Nick Sifuentes, the executive director of Tri-State Transportation Campaign, an advocacy group.

One of the six routes chosen for signal upgrades desperately needs them: the A line in Brooklyn, which has an on-time rate of 65%, one of the worst in New York. A few miles away, the L train has modern signals and a sterling 93% on-time rate.

“I definitely think they need to upgrade it,” said Enosh Svoray, 34, an airline worker and A train rider who lives in Brooklyn. “It’s just going to be difficult in the meantime. I need to get to work. I need to have a life.”

Subway signals are the centerpiece of the agency’s next capital plan, which calls for a $54 billion investment in the region’s transit network over the next five years. It is the authority’s largest spending plan ever, and signals were among the largest budget items.

Modern signals allow more trains to run closer together and make them less prone to the failures that can produce a cascade of delays. For now, only two of the subway’s 22 routes — the L and the No. 7 — have upgraded signals and they have the highest on-time rates.

Signal problems are typically among the top reasons for train delays. In July, signal failures caused nearly 33% of major incidents, those that delay 50 or more trains, according to the transit agency.

The subway’s leader, Andy Byford, who has talked about the need for modern signals for months, said he was “ecstatically happy” that they were a top priority in the capital plan.

But Byford also cautioned that the repairs would require extensive station closings on nights and weekends.

“Let’s be clear, re-signalling the subway is going to take the patience of New Yorkers,” he said at a news conference.

The capital plan is a wish list of the agency’s priorities and it is mostly unfunded. Transit leaders are urging state, city and federal leaders to provide billions of dollars to make it a reality.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who controls the subway, supports the plan, and he persuaded state lawmakers to approve congestion pricing tolls in Manhattan to help pay for it. But it is not clear whether Mayor Bill de Blasio or the Trump administration will make major contributions.

There is also the question of how best to install modern signals. The transit agency has previously used a technology known as communications-based train control, or CBTC. Byford favors that method and says he can put it into effect more quickly than his predecessors, but Cuomo has pressed the agency to look at other methods, including a technology called ultra-wideband that has not been used on major transit systems.

If the capital plan moves forward, the routes set for signal upgrades are the busy Lexington Avenue line in Manhattan, including the 4, 5 and 6 trains; the A and C lines in Brooklyn; the N and W lines in Queens; the E and F lines in Queens; and the G line in Brooklyn and Queens.

Many of the neighborhoods served by those trains, from Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn to Jamaica in Queens, are working-class or middle-income areas that have longed for better subway service. And while the subway has started to recover from a deep crisis, some lines are still worse than others.

Gerson Amaya, 42, a carpenter who lives in Brooklyn, said that his commute to Inwood on the A train was long — “long enough for a nap.”

“Any delays on top of it just makes it worse,” Amaya said as he rode the A on a recent morning. “There’s always a signal down or some issue.”

Susan Roy, 45, a wine buyer who lives in Richmond Hill in Queens, said that the A train had not received the attention it deserved.

“The A is the longest line, but it seems like it’s always been an afterthought,” she said. “It’s definitely neglected.”

Roy said she welcomed the prospect of upgrades. “It will affect me, but if it’s going to improve, then I don’t mind changing my route,” she said.

Still, some subway riders are skeptical that the transit agency can make the necessary fixes. Jasmine Chang, 23, a film editor who lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, said she was so frustrated with the subway that she had considered buying a car.

“I’m glad they’re working on the A, but I feel like it’s just hopeless,” she said. “How much difference can it really make when every line is messed up?”

When the No. 7 train was upgraded this year after months of painful station closings and project delays, the line added four trains per hour, Byford said. That increased the number of trains running each hour to 29 from 25, allowing more riders to use the line.

Subway leaders say they will continue to test the ultra-wideband technology to determine whether it can be part of the signal overhaul. At a technology conference on Friday, Cuomo maintained his position: that the cost estimate for installing new signals on the 12-mile-long piece of the Lexington Avenue line, at $3 billion, was far too high.

“We cannot succeed long-term without new technology,” Cuomo said.

Transit leaders are not planning to build new subway lines as part of the capital plan, except for three new stations on the Second Avenue subway in East Harlem — a project that has been in the works for nearly a century. But they made the argument that installing modern signals was an expansion of the subway because it would open the system to more people.

“Re-signalling is an expansion strategy,” said Janno Lieber, the authority’s head of capital construction. “It takes your existing infrastructure and allows you to run a lot more trains faster and safely.”

But the prospect of stations being closed on nights and weekends to achieve that goal worried some riders.

Rosa Martinez, 43, a cleaner who also lives in Cypress Hills, said that she often worked at night and was concerned that walking to another station might be dangerous at late hours.

“It should be upgraded because you never know what’s going to happen,” she said. “I don’t want to have old signals because it should be safety first.”

“But,” she said, “it’s going to be really tough for me.”

The New York Subway Was Delayed by 1930s Signals. A Fix Is Finally Coming.

NEW YORK — New Yorkers have grown unhappily accustomed to hearing that their trains are delayed by “signal problems.” But most riders probably have no idea what that means.

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Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Rebecca Liebson

Articles written by the author

MTA Pledges $5 Billion for Subway Elevators. Guess How Many.

The New York Subway Was Delayed by 1930s Signals. A Fix Is Finally Coming.