BY BEN BRACHFELD
Midwood straphangers
with disabilities will soon
be stuck as the Metropolitan
Transportation Authority
prepares to close the Flatbush
Ave-Brooklyn College subway’s
elevator until next year
— leaving the station’s steep
staircase as the only option to
board the 2 and 5 trains.
Work to replace the elevator,
situated at the southern
point of the busy intersection
of Flatbush and Nostrand avenues,
will start on July 7, and
is expected to continue until
the fi rst quarter of 2022.
The lift, which was installed
in 1997 to comply with the federal
government’s Americans
with Disabilities Act, has
reached the end of its “useful
lifespan” — even outlasting a
hydraulic elevator’s standard
of 17.5 years, an MTA spokesperson
told Brooklyn Paper.
It will be upgraded to include
COURIER L 28 IFE, JUNE 11-17, 2021
modernized equipment,
including a new elevator cab,
and new equipment in the cab,
shaft, and pit. The MTA will
also renovate the elevator’s
machine room, spruce up its
surveillance and fi re alarm
systems, and upgrade its “Lift-
Net remote monitoring equipment”
which will allow the authority
to be more responsive
to elevator failures.
The project, which was included
in the MTA’s 2015-19
capital plan, will cost approximately
$7.65 million.
“Accessibility means building
new elevators, replacing old
ones so they stay reliable, and
a host of other station, train
and bus improvements across
the system, all of which is underway
at the same time,” said
Quemuel Arroyo, the MTA’s
chief accessibility offi cer, in a
statement to Brooklyn Paper.
“When this project is done, the
Flatbush Ave station will have
a state-of-the-art elevator that
customers can rely upon for
years to come. We thank our
customers for their patience
and invite them to use the fully
accessible bus system while this
critical work is underway.”
A 2000 report by the city’s
then-Public Advocate Mark
Green on elevators and escalators
in subway stations, entitled
“Stuck,” found that the station’s
lift was already suffering
from outages as soon as 1999,
experiencing 29 outages that
year, and 22 the following year.
The elevator was in service
93.16 percent of the time in
April of 2021, when the most recent
data is available, according
to the MTA’s Elevator and
Escalator Performance Dashboard.
The MTA performance
benchmark considers an elevator
in good condition if it is operational
at least 96.5 percent of
the time, a spokesperson said.
Elevators can go out of service
The Flatbush Ave-Brooklyn College station elevator. Photo by Ben Brachfeld
for either malfunctions or
for scheduled maintenance.
Joe Rappaport, one of the
2000 report’s authors and now
the executive director of the
Brooklyn Center for the Independence
of the Disabled, said
that, while elevator maintenance
and repair is something
of a fact of life for people with
disabilities, the prolonged loss
of the lift will be acutely felt
by riders with disabilities who
rely on the station.
“The loss of a station like
this, far away from any other
accessible station, really
makes it diffi cult for anyone,
in a wheelchair or if they have
other mobility problems, from
using the subway system,” Rappaport
told Brooklyn Paper.
The MTA is advising riders
who rely on the elevator to ride
the bus to the Church Ave 2/5
station, which is three stops
and over a mile away, in order
to access the subway system.
Rappaport also noted that
the half-year timeline for replacement
will be burdensome
on straphangers with other
mobility issues.
“Why does it take so damn
long to replace an elevator,”
Rappaport said, “and why is
there only one elevator at that
station, so if there is a replacement,
the entire neighborhood
is inaccessible.”
OUT OF SERVICE
Flatbush Avenue elevator to close for six
months, rendering station ADA inaccessible
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