The MTA announced that three new elevators have opened at the 14th St./6th Ave. station. They will provide better access for the 30,000 passengers who use the station’s F, M and L stops every day.
The MTA is required by the federal government to make 95 percent of its stations barrier-free by 2055 after settling a class action lawsuit in 2022.
The agency says one elevator will take users from street level to the station’s mezzanine, another will connect users from the mezzanine to the F and M platform in the upper city, and yet another will connect users from the mezzanine to the L platform that travels in all directions. The agency added that three more elevators, which will provide similar accessibility to the station’s F and M platform in the downtown area, are still in the works and will open later this year.
The entire 14th St. redevelopment is being done with significant federal funding of $250 million, 80 percent of the total cost. As Lieber put it, “This is a mega-project.”
In addition to the MTA chief, the opening event also featured Quemuel Arroyo, MTA’s Chief Accessibility Officer, as well as State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal and State Assemblymember Deborah Glick, who spoke before the street-level elevator, not to mention an impressive crowd of MTA employees, all in high-visibility gear and hard hats.
“Part of the challenge we always face with accessibility is that our system is old! The different parts of this station have been around for 80 to over 100 years,” Lieber said. “So it goes without saying that bringing all of this infrastructure into the 21st century is not easy, and it’s not cheap, and it’s really complicated from an engineering perspective.”
“Our subway forefathers, who we praise every day for creating this great system, did not think about accessibility. We are still struggling with that,” he added.
While people with disabilities will benefit tremendously from the new elevators, Lieber said, they will also make life easier for a wider group of people, including parents with strollers, senior citizens and people with lots of shopping bags.
Arroyo, the chief accessibility officer, called the 14th St. megaproject “incredibly important.”
“14th St. has so much to offer and this project will open up so many new destinations and journeys for our customers. None of this would be possible without our partners at the federal and state levels,” he added.
Arroyo also briefly mentioned the fact that some of the MTA’s other accessibility projects were affected by the suspension of congestion tolls, which blew a $15 billion hole in the MTA’s capital plan when the billion dollars in expected toll revenues disappeared. He suggested that the agency was counting on Albany to fill this newly created budget gap.
When it came time to speak, Representative Glick pointed out that disability can be universal: “Let’s be clear. We are all only temporarily physically abled. At some point, as we get older or have an accident, we may all need to be able to use this great system of elevators.”
“I’m glad that under Lieber’s leadership, the hard times are over when people with disabilities – who couldn’t use the subway – were simply ‘a cost of doing business,'” Holyman-Sigal said during his time at the microphone. “There is a fundamental right to access public transportation.”
