Brooklyn Heights Man Speaks Out on Subway Escalator Outages

By on April 21, 2009 12:01 pm in Brooklyn Heights

AM New York questions  the MTA’s maintainence of the NYC subway system’s escalators in a recent article.  A Brooklyn Heights man is quoted:

AM New York: “We come here specifically for the escalators,” said Hyman Muchnich, 84, of Brooklyn Heights. “They’re supposed to make it easier.”

The MTA spent $36 million last year to overhaul the Herald Square escalators. But the contractor, Fujitec America, didn’t install the equipment correctly and must make mechanical adjustments, New York City Transit officials said.

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  • AEB

    I use the High St. station daily. One escalator is frequently kaput. However, I consider that to be the least of my problems with the MTA.

    At the moment, the biggest one is the weekend rerouting of trains, with the concomitant misinformation about same posted in stations AND online.

    MAJOR gripe.

  • alex

    Worse still is when the booth attendants must know trains aren’t running on schedule, but still let you get all the way down to the tracks to find out for yourself.

  • AEB

    To their credit, notices are sometimes posted just above the turnstiles by High St. attendants–exactly where you can’t miss them.

    The downside is that these handwritten notices are frequently descriptively inadequate–but they DO put travelers on guard.

  • http://mermaidsonparade.blogspot.com melanie hope greenberg

    The weekend rerouting is a major drag. I use http://www.mta.info “Service Advisories” link before heading out.

  • peppermint

    When you are 84 years old an esclalator makes a big difference in your commute. Can you imagine having to walk up all of those stairs when you’re 84 years old? Seriously, it’s a health concern not to have those working.

  • Andrew Porter

    Years ago, the escalators at High Street were solid mahogany and never broke down. They were eventually replaced because of the King’s Cross fire in the London Underground, in which a fire smoldered in trash under the wooden steps and eventually caused the death of many people. But the High Street escalators have frequently been out of service since the “upgrade”.

    What upsets me more are the people who do not walk down the moving escalators, causing a backup. Two of the High Street escalators are too narrow to permit people to go around these stationary impediments.

  • LS

    Andrew, If you want to walk down why don’t you just walk down the stairs instead?

  • epc

    Andrew: some of us take the escalators because we can’t walk down stairs and the elevator at High Street is very difficult to find, almost as though it were not there.