Accessible Upgrade Makes MetroTech A 'Station Of The Future': MTA

DOWNTOWN, BROOKLYN — Edith Prentiss has been riding subways in her wheelchair for more than two decades, but she still often gets lost on some platforms while searching for an elevator.

"Unless you've memorized the station — and you've memorized your local station, but you don't memorize all 400 — you have no idea [where it is]," she said. "You get onto the platform, you go one way, you come back, you go the other way and then you say, 'Am I at the right station?'"

That day-to-day struggle is one reason why Prentiss was so happy to see a small stretch of blue tape on the floor of Brooklyn's Jay Street-MetroTech station Wednesday. Unlike high-up signage that she says can be confusing or hard to see, the tape leads her right to the elevator she needs, she said.

The "tape guideways" Prentiss loved are among 15 new accessibility upgrades added to the crowded Downtown Brooklyn stop as the MTA experiments with new technologies to help New Yorkers with disabilities get around.

(Anna Quinn/Patch) Blue "guidance tiles" are set up throughout the MetroTech station.

The "Accessible Station Lab," as the MTA calls it, will be at MetroTech until the end of the year. The transit agency wants riders to use its website to submit feedback on the new tools, which include four smartphone apps, interactive maps and physical tools like the tape or textured tiles.

That feedback will be used to determine which tools can eventually be rolled out across the city's subways as part of the MTA's $51-billion plan to overhaul its beleaguered transit system, New York City Transit President Andy Byford said.

"Accessibility isn't just about elevators," Byford said. "There are sensory disabilities, there are cognitive disabilities, there is a whole spectrum of disabilities.

"We want to showcase a suite ... that maybe will be part of the stations of the future," he added.

Many of the new features added to MetroTech are redundant, transit officials said, meaning straphangers will be the ones to decide which should stick around and which don't work as well.

Among those are four apps — Waymap, NaviLens, AIRA and Magnus Cards — that help riders with visual, hearing or mobility impairments get around. Riders can scan codes on the station's walls for directions on one app, or on another, the visually impaired can connect with live agents who will describe things through their smartphone camera.

The "way-finding tools" are accompanied by two different large maps set up near the station's entrance. One is a "tactile" map outfitted with braille and another is on an interactive tablet.

(Anna Quinn/Patch) An interactive environment map is set up at the station's entrance.

Prentiss said the tools will help disabled New Yorkers with one of their largest obstacles to getting around the subway system: information.

"What's happening now is there is a greater emphasis on [getting us] information that will get us around," she said. "For many of us, this has been a significant change in the situation."

The changes are a long way from when she first started riding the subway in a wheelchair, in the 1990s, and had to be regularly carried out by FDNY if an elevator didn't work, Prentiss said.

But, she added, there is still a long way to go.

Prentiss still worries about getting the wheels on her wheelchair caught in the gaps between the platform and subway cars. She's also concerned about her own station in Washington Heights, which is one of four in the neighborhood that will go without elevators for a year while the MTA replaces them. Even when the construction is done, Prentiss said, the elevators still won't go directly to the platform.

(Anna Quinn/Patch) Alex Elegudin, the MTA's senior advisor for systemwide accessibility, explains tools that will be added in the future.

Upgrades like "gap filler solutions" and more accessible turnstiles are some of the tools that weren't included in the MetroTech lab, but are likely not far down the pipeline, said Alex Elegudin, the MTA's senior adviser for systemwide accessibility.

The transit authority's $51 billion plan includes $5 billion to add elevators at 70 subway stations, which officials said will make it so straphangers won't be further than one stop from an accessible station in five years.

"All these kind of different things we know we need to put in place to help our customers use our system," Elegudin said. "We're absolutely committed to it. We absolutely want to find a way to ... change the standard for what accessibility means."