Escalators and elevators in the city’s subway system are constantly breaking down and out of service because nearly 80 percent of them don’t get the maintenance they need, according to a new audit released Monday.
City Comptroller Scott Stringer’s office reviewed a random sample of 65 of the city’s 407 total escalators and elevators and found that around 50 hadn’t undergone all of their “scheduled preventative maintenance service assignments,” the study found.
“We have a complete maintenance mess,” said Stringer, who announced the results of the audit at a press conference. “[MTA officials] are not planning, they are not holding accountable people in the agency. They are not creating work orders that would trigger repairs. And when they do a repair or they don’t, there’s no tracking system.”
The 36 elevators and 29 escalators that were sampled were scheduled to undergo 849 total service jobs between Dec. 29, 2014, and July 2, 2016. But Stringer’s report found that 34 percent of those jobs, or 289, weren’t completed on time, if at all.
The audit also noted that 21 of the 65 escalators and elevators failed MTA inspections and were removed from service even though they’d undergone repairs about two weeks earlier.
The 65 machines were chosen at random from four zones in the city, the audit said.
The top three worst in terms of availability were an escalator at Atlantic Avenue-Barclay’s Center on the B and Q line, an elevator at 168 Street-Broadway on the 1 train line and an elevator at the 191 Street-St. Nicholas Avenue line on the 1 train.
“It’s not rocket science – it’s common-sense,” Stringer noted in a press release.
“When seniors and people with disabilities can’t get to where they need to go because of a broken elevator or escalator, government is failing them.”
Last week, fed-up commuters filed class action lawsuits claiming that only 112 out of the city’s 472 subway stations are wheelchair-accessible and that disabled riders are often left stranded at stations because of frequently broken elevators and escalators.
One of the plaintiffs, Sasha Blair-Goldensohn, said at Monday’s press conference that out-of-service elevators have forced him to have to rely on fellow riders to help him up the stairs. Blair-Goldensohn was crippled by a falling tree limb in Central Park in 2009.
“I have a whole system,” he explained. “If I can find three strongish people, you tell them how you do it. You say, ‘OK, you hold here, you hold here and one on the back.’ I don’t like to have to do it, but when I have asked people, people step up.”
The audit said the New York City Transit’s Division of Elevators and Escalators, which is part of the MTA, doesn’t systematically track service details, such as whether defects in its elevators and escalators are found and how quickly they’re corrected.
“There’s no rhyme or reason as to how one repairs an elevator in this town,” said Stringer.
Stringer’s office made 13 recommendations to fix the problems, including “setting realistic internal targets for preventive maintenance service assignments, reinstructing all personnel on their responsibilities for completing and approving checklists, and instituting rigorous procedures for ensuring work orders are created and every defect identified is addressed.”
In a memo in response to the audit, NYCT said the comptroller’s office relied on “faulty methodology” and that it has a “robust system” to track and correct defects.
“It excluded from its sample all machines installed after 2011. As a result of excluding newer machines that have higher performance records, the audit was skewed toward machines that are more likely to break down,” NYCT said.
The agency maintained its elevators and escalators, which carry nearly 6 million people every day, are available to customers “approximately 96 percent of the time.”
NYCT explained that out of the 849 planned service jobs, 95 were canceled because they were no longer necessary and out of the 754 remaining, all but 30 were completed.
“In other words, planned maintenance was carried out 96 percent of the time – not the 20 percent as the audit implies,” the memo said.
MTA spokeswoman Beth DeFalco said NYCT is spending more than $1 billion to up the number of Americans with Disability Act-compliant subway stations and replace existing elevators and escalators.
“The most in-depth inspections were all completed on time during the audit period. We have a detailed system for the maintenance of these machines and closely track work that is done to keep our elevators and escalators safe and available for our customers,” she said. “We are continually looking at new ways to improve the performance of equipment and maintenance practices.”