Disability advocates and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority reached a settlement in a long-running class action lawsuit regarding elevator outages in the city’s subway system, officials announced at a July MTA Board meeting.
The agreement includes major accessibility improvements in the subways for people with disabilities. Those include enhanced elevator outage information, alternate route information, digital updates, and real-time web/app access. The MTA will provide outage announcements, 511 assistance, and email/text alerts, while strengthening accessibility through staff training, timely reporting, and prompt customer response, according to a release sent to Able News by Disability Rights Advocates. See the detailed list of improvements here.
The agreement was announced at the July 29 MTA Board meeting where officials signed the paperwork with leaders in the disability community.
“It’s a great day,” said Sharon McLennon Wier, Executive Director of the Center for Independent Living, NY (CIDNY), at the signing ceremony which was live streamed from the MTA board meeting. “I had the privilege of working with disability advocates and consumers and staff and board members to ensure that New York City is an accessible place for all.
“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,” she said. “We have struggled in trying to ensure that people with mobility disabilities and sensory disabilities actually have the ability to get on the subway car and not have to deal with delays and understanding if an elevator is working or not working. In signing this settlement, we are going to learn that notifications will be put in place and someone doesn’t have to be stranded or spend more time during their journey getting where they need to get to.”
Janno Lieber, MTA chair and chief executive officer, said a historic transformation of the MTA is underway to being a fully accessible system though it is not yet completed. At the signing ceremony, he said it’s his hope that the MTA and the disability community, going forward, work together in “conference rooms of collaboration rather that courthouses of litigation.”
The class action lawsuit was filed in April 2017 on behalf of a coalition of disability rights organizations, including CIDNY, and individuals who use wheelchairs by Disability Rights Advocates. The lawsuit targeted subway stations that have elevators and was filed on the same day as a lawsuit targeting subway stations that did not have elevators, which led to the MTA’s agreement to install elevators in 95% of subway stations, according to the statement from Disability Rights.
The settlement follows lengthy litigation in both the federal district court and court of appeals regarding what steps the MTA needs to take when elevators are out of service.
Because it is a class action, the settlement must now be approved by Judge George B. Daniels in the Southern District of New York who has overseen the case.
See prior coverage in Able News.