Your guide to NYC's public proceedings.

Q&A

Cost and implementation of elevators and escalators in subway stations

1:07:57

ยท

73 sec

Council Member Mercedes Narcisse inquires about the average cost of installing elevators or escalators in subway stations. John McCarthy, Chief of Policy and External Relations at MTA, provides a detailed response on costs and recent innovations.

  • The average cost for an elevator package is around $60-80 million
  • MTA has developed innovative ways to reduce costs, such as direct-to-platform elevators for elevated stations
  • The new approach is both cost-effective and more user-friendly
  • MTA is now implementing accessibility improvements 4.5 times faster than 5-6 years ago
Mercedes Narcisse
1:07:57
is the course for elevator or escalator?
Demetrius Crichlow
1:08:00
What's the course?
1:08:01
I'm sorry.
Mercedes Narcisse
1:08:01
Yeah.
1:08:02
Mhmm.
1:08:02
What's the course?
1:08:03
What's average course?
1:08:04
You don't have to be specific.
1:08:05
What's the average course for elevator?
1:08:07
I can an elevator for accessibility.
John McCarthy
1:08:09
Sure.
1:08:10
I can jump in on that.
1:08:11
So the way we do an elevator package, we package it with other work at the station.
1:08:16
The neighborhood of the cost is around 60 to 80,000,000 to go in there, do elevators.
1:08:23
It's lower than it was before.
1:08:25
We've sort of come up with some really new innovative ways of building, including taking some of the stations that are the elevated stations, taking the elevator directly to the platform.
1:08:36
It used to be that we'd build an extra elevator, take you to the mezzanine, and then send you over to the different sides and then go up.
1:08:43
And if someone's say if you're someone who's using a wheelchair or it depends on that elevator, you get to that mezzanine and one of them is not working, that's no fun.
1:08:51
So it's doing two things.
1:08:53
It's customer friendly and it's also saving us money.
1:08:57
So there's always outliers.
1:08:58
Some are less expensive and some are more expensive, but that's generally the neighborhood.
1:09:02
The good news is it's lower than it was and we're cranking these out at four and a half times what we used to do five, six years ago.
Citymeetings.nyc pigeon logo

Is citymeetings.nyc useful to you?

I'm thrilled!

Please help me out by answering just one question.

What do you do?

Thank you!

Want to stay up to date? Sign up for the newsletter.