91–100 of 142 posts
I don't agree that New York has a Great Subway. It is really dirty. The homeless people use it as their home as they don't have any where else to go.
This article paints a pretty negative view of it, but looking at the numbers, that might not be the case: 425 stations total 92 stations accessible Boston has 53 stations, with "90% wheelchair accessible", sounds like 48 to me. So "lousy" NYC has almost double the number of wheelchair accessible stations as "great" Boston, and 8 times the total number of stations. Sadly, retrofitting more elevators into existing stat…
> So "lousy" NYC has almost double the number of wheelchair accessible stations as "great" Boston, and 8 times the total number of stations. That's comparing apples to watermelons. Boston has a population of 650,000; New York, 8.5 million. So in Boston there is one accessible station per 13,500 residents. In New York, one per 92,400 residents. (The total residents per station is much more comparable, at 12.2k and 20k…
I highly suspect it is plain cheaper (and more convenient) to just subsidize private car rides for disabled people than making entire transit infrastructure in huge city to account for them. Better yet, take the money that government would otherwise spend on building all the wheelchair accomodations, and just distribute that between wheelchair users. I am sure many of them would prefer that over subway improvements w…
Remember that it's not just people in wheelchairs who benefit from accessibility though. The elderly, injured infirm, people with small children etc. also find accessibility helpful. Modern accessibility policy is focused in a large part around allowing people with accessibility requirement to live as normal a life as possible. It's not going to change overnight, but by making sure that all new construction and refur…
In addition to that, I wager there's value in extending the current infrastructure so as to not ostracize disabled people even further.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anecdotally: last year I was riding in a train that hit someone who fell onto the tracks because the platform was so crowded. 30 minutes later, one station away, a woman lost both her legs when a train ran them over. When I lived in Tokyo, they put platform guard walls in at many stations. They were about chest high and had sets of doors that would open before the train doors opened, and if we had them in NYC, both o…
In London, they simply close the station entrances (at street level) before it becomes so overcrowded. It can be a daily occurrence, e.g. at rush hour during a month of upgrade work on a particular line. There is no record of anyone being killed or severely injured through overcrowding.
I highly suspect it is plain cheaper (and more convenient) to just subsidize private car rides for disabled people than making entire transit infrastructure in huge city to account for them. Better yet, take the money that government would otherwise spend on building all the wheelchair accomodations, and just distribute that between wheelchair users. I am sure many of them would prefer that over subway improvements w…
The thing with accessibility elevators is it just not people in wheel chair that benefit from them. Elderly people, people that have sports injury and can't climb stairs, having groceries, or kids and strollers etc, etc... Even in the sidewalks, the lips of the sidewalks that slope towards the street in intersections, it is just not people with wheelchairs that benefit from them, but anybody with carrying a stroller,…
I highly suspect it is plain cheaper (and more convenient) to just subsidize private car rides for disabled people than making entire transit infrastructure in huge city to account for them. Better yet, take the money that government would otherwise spend on building all the wheelchair accomodations, and just distribute that between wheelchair users. I am sure many of them would prefer that over subway improvements w…
I think MTA should also consider putting a barrier on the edge of the platform. So that we won't get dozens of people being pushed off to the rails.
6 people died from being struck by trains in a year (I think that was 2015 they pushed in their advertisements). There were about 1.76 billion rides in the same period. As much as it's a feel-good measure, there is no conceivable way to justify the incredible expense of platform doors for such a small number of instances. And the dirty secret is most of those are suicides. If they can't kill themselves on a train, th…
It's certainly past time that some tiny fraction of the billions of dollars spent on accessibility were spent subsidizing modes of travel that don't require such bland and dehumanized environs. Elevators on medium-sized buildings (and subways) are a nuisance, in that they make most of the population less healthy in exchange for 0.7% of the population being able to explore every nook. If the law hadn't cemented handic…
> only 92 of the system’s 425 stations accessible > On average, 25 elevators a day stop working Do 27% of elevators really break down on a _daily_ basis? That is abysmal if accurate.
I don't see too many elevators and hopefully it gets fixed with the push the governor is making towards modernizing stations across NYC. It's important to remember that a lot of the stations, in Lower Manhattan especially, are way too small (4-5 foot wide platforms with 2 stairwells). I don't see elevators happening at those stations. A lot of these smaller platforms are connected other small platforms via stairs (th…