Riders with disabilities have needed to find alternative transportation for months, while elevators near Hostos and The Hub remain closed.
Altaune Brown shouts compliments at passersby on East 149th Street at the Hub. He’s uniquely good at it –there’s no heckling or catcalling, just discerning flattery.
“There she goes again – you’re doing great mom, like always!” he yelled into his megaphone on a Wednesday in September, to the obvious delight of a mother walking by with her three kids. A man in an impeccably pressed suit passed and tried to resist a grin as Altaune called, “Ok! I see you!”
Although he’s not paid to do this work, Altaune holds himself to workplace standards.
“My job is to motivate people,” he said. Altaune aims to be at The Hub everyday by 1 p.m., ready to engage the community. “They look for me for this. They out here saying, ‘I had a bad day. I needed to hear your voice. You always saying something positive.’”
But ever since the Third Avenue/149th Street subway station elevators closed down for repairs, the commute has become a nightmare for wheelchair-bound Altaune.
“I remember the day it closed,” Altaune recalls. “I was getting off the train…but they said the elevators closed, so I had to get back on the train, go all the way uptown to come downtown at another stop to get off and then take an Uber.”
Nowadays, to get to The Hub from his apartment on the Lower East Side, Altaune has to use Access-A-Ride, an MTA paratransit service for riders with disabilities, or take an Uber. Access-A-Ride, (“or as we call it ‘A-Stressor-Ride,’” says Altaune) often takes around 30 minutes to pick him up, and trips are prolonged because a driver may have to drop off multiple passengers before getting Altaune to his destination. If there are too many people in the car, Altaune won’t get in– he doesn’t like to be late. “Today it was an Uber, which was like 55 dollars. Sometimes it goes all the way up to 60, 70 dollars.”
The elevators at the Third Avenue/149th Street 2/5 station have been closed for the better part of this year for capital replacements. The nearest station, 149 St–Grand Concourse, was supposed to have a working elevator by this July, but it is now slated to be completed in December.
Kara Gurl, the planning and advocacy manager at the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee, is concerned that the congestion pricing pause might delay the completion of accessibility projects around the city.
“We just learned a couple of months ago that 23 subway elevator improvements were put on hold because of the governor’s pause of congestion pricing, which is extremely alarming to us and many riders around the system who are really depending on elevators. They’re no longer going to see accessibility at their station, or if they do, it may not be for a very, very long time.”
And although the new $68 billion Capital Plan, approved on Wednesday by the MTA board, pledges nearly $12 million for “passenger stations and accessibility,” Gurl is worried about the program’s $15 billion funding gap created by the pause in congestion pricing. “We’re definitely concerned that these important projects will not actually find funding.”
An MTA spokesperson, however, says that “The pause in congestion pricing has no effect on the ongoing work at the 2/4/5 at 149th Street/Grand Concourse.” Of the Third Avenue/149 Street elevator completion, MTA Chief Accessibility Officer Quemuel Arroyo said, “That’s coming up imminently; I think within the next two months.”
The Bronx has the highest rate of ambulatory disability in the city, with 11.1% of residents reporting difficulty walking. In the Mott Haven zip code that holds The Hub, that number is 12.4%. The MTA recently announced that the elevator repairs at Third Avenue/149 Street are expected to be completed by the end of the month, and that the Grand Concourse station will be fully ADA accessible by this coming December. In the meantime, many riders with disabilities must continue to find other options.
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