OP-ED: 33 Years of the ADA – Connecting New Yorkers One Subway Station at a Time

July 26, 2023, will mark 33 years since then-President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) into law in 1990.

At the time, the president remarked that the bill would “ensure that people with disabilities are given the basic guarantees for which they have worked so long and so hard: independence, freedom of choice, control of their lives, the opportunity to blend fully and equally into the rich mosaic of the American mainstream.”

Today, our country is home to more than 61 million people with disabilities, on top of countless individuals of all ages with mobility issues, perhaps with the assistance of scooters, wheelchairs, walkers or other devices.

All of these people require access to mass transit and all of them have benefitted from the ADA, as it has spurred more and more transit agencies across the nation to invest in necessary planning, budgeting and design-build projects to allow elevators to effectively be cut into the bedrock that underpins our city streets.

The busiest and oldest subway system in the nation is in New York City. Dating back to the year 1904, our 24-hour system includes many stations that have been continuously active since before World War II.

In those days, few considered the need to provide access to customers with limited mobility, which is one of the key reasons why transit leaders in New York are moving at a rapid pace to add elevators, escalators and ramps to hundreds of stations across the boroughs.

So how does a construction and engineering team go about building new elevator access on a busy avenue in Manhattan, Queens or Brooklyn for that matter, without seriously disrupting the flow of vehicular and pedestrian traffic?

A below ground subway station is generally one to two levels below the surface, with trains and customers coming and going all day and night. This requires engineering and construction crews to plan, dig and build at a location from the street down to the station below.

Immediately below the surface are sewer and water supply pipes, steam heat and electrical lines, as well as internet and phone cable connections and the internal organs, if you will, connecting essential services to countless neighborhood buildings. Before anything else, all this infrastructure needs to be relocated, without disruption of services to countless neighborhood businesses and residents. Additionally, this work typically calls for heavy equipment to excavate large quantities of rock, fill, concrete and asphalt.

It is a remarkable feat of engineering, to blend the old and the new technology within transit stations that have loyally been serving New Yorkers for generations. Given the complicated underground conditions, these projects can take many months to get started and may need to be phased in to coordinate the utilities and the public access to these areas.

In a 24/7 city like New York City, there simply is no ideal time to do this work while avoiding the crowds, but the result for countless New Yorkers with limited mobility is well worth the inconvenience. Stations lacking ADA accessibility might preclude an individual from selecting that neighborhood for housing, job opportunities, shopping or recreation.

This delicate dance of modernization and convenience opens those doors that were once closed to so many with limited mobility in our city. For them, creating unmitigated access to our great mass transit system is a potential game changer.

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John Culkin is vice president of Forte Construction Corp.