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MTA escalator outages system-wide

By Marlene Naanes and Matthew Sweeney | mnaanes@am-ny.com

April 25, 2008

The escalator at Union Square Subway Station at the corner of East 14th Street and Union Square West has been out-of-service for over a year. The responsibility for the escalator is shared between the MTA and the owners of the commercial building Zackendorf Towers. MTA Commuters have had to use the adjacent staircases to make their to and from the subway. (Dennis W. Ho / April 23, 2008)

The most unreliable ride in the subway system is apparently on the escalators, according to straphangers and transit advocates who said that in some cases, outages can last months.

At Herald Square, escalators leading to the B, D, F and V trains are out daily, riders said Thursday.

And a sign at the bottom of an escalator at the 59th Street and Lexington Avenue station leading to the downtown 4 and 5 trains told straphangers Thursday it was out of service until April 12.

"This is like four flights," said Dolores Barrett, 59, of Harlem, a diabetes sufferer on her way to a doctor's appointment, who let people pass her as she slowly climbed up the stairs at the Lexington Avenue station. "For people that are disabled and have heart conditions, that's not fair."

One notorious outage occurred at 53rd Street and Lexington's E and V platform, where passengers had a hard time getting to street level for almost a year while a new escalator was installed there between 2002 and 2003. More recently, amNewYork on Thursday profiled privately-owned escalators at the Union Square station that haven't moved in almost a year.

New York City Transit officials would not comment on specific outages but said escalators can stop running for many reasons. They stop if a safety feature is triggered or because of vandalism, heavy traffic and subway grime getting onto moving parts.

"That said, we are working to improve the availability and the reliability of the equipment we have out there," said transit spokesman Paul Fleuranges. The agency noted it is also in the final stages of installing an electronic monitoring equipment on all escalators and elevators that will send real-time information to Transit on outages.

Michael Harris, executive director for the disabled riders program, said outages seem shorter now because of more frequent maintenance, but there's still room for improvement.

"Is the subway system reliable for someone to trust it on a daily basis? Probably not," Harris said.