Escalator Breakdowns 'Frequent' At New 2nd Avenue Subway Stops

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — The Upper East Side celebrated when the Second Avenue Subway opened on New Year's Day of 2017, but after just two-and-a-half years in operation escalators at the three new Q line stations are failing to meet the MTA's performance goals, according to an internal study.

The MTA Inspector General conducted a 15-month investigation of escalator performance at the 72nd Street, 86th Street and 96th Street stops from Jan. 2017 to March 2018 and found that just three of the 32 escalators at the brand-new stations met MTA standards for proper service, according to report released this week. The MTA expects that escalators are up and running for customers at least 92.5% of the time per month.

MTA Inspector General Carolyn Pokorny was especially worried that MTA employees seemed unaware that poor escalator service was even an issue at the stations and could not explain why breakdowns were occurring.

"While escalator outages at any station frustrate and inconvenience riders, the frequent and prolonged outages at the [Second Avenue Subway] stations are especially troubling because the escalators are comparatively brand new," Pokorny wrote this month in a letter to New York City Transit CEO Andy Byford. "Most concerning, though, is that NYC Transit cannot adequately explain why these escalators are so frequently out-of-service."

Many of the problems with service on the Second Avenue Subway's escalators occur at a single station: East 72nd Street. The 10 escalators at the station were installed and are maintained by the Schindler Elevator Corporation whereas the 22 escalators at the East 86th and 96th street stations were built by the KONE Corportation and are maintained by Slade Industries. The Schindler escalators experience 88% more outages than the KONE escalators do.

MTA investigators found that Schindler failed to perform 67% of its required maintenance work on escalators at the East 72nd Street station, which the inspector general described as "unacceptable." The investigation found that poor performance of escalators at East 72nd Street correlated to Schindler's lack of maintenance.

An MTA spokesman said that the agency has been working with the contractor since mid 2018 on an "action plan" designed to improve escalator service at the station.

"Senior MTA leadership, including NYC Transit President Andy Byford, are taking this issue extremely seriously and have been meeting with Schindler to hold them fully accountable and to make clear that their failure has put future work with the MTA at risk," MTA spokesman Maxwell Young said in a statement.

"We have been able to extract reforms and improvements from this dogged oversight but the escalators need to perform better, and our efforts to ensure the contractor fulfills their obligations on behalf of our customers will not cease."

The MTA Inspector General made the following five recommendations that were all approved by the agency:

1. Require the MTA Elevator and Escalator Department to conduct an analysis to determine the root causes behind poor escalator performance at the Second Avenue Subway stations;
2. Ensure that contractors are performing required preventative maintenance work and responding to service calls in a timely manner while considering terminating contracts if these two conditions are not met;
3. Contact MTA Capital Construction and the Long Island Railroad regarding Schindler's poor performance in maintaining Second Avenue Subway escalators. The contractor is working with the agencies on the MTA's East Side Access project;
4. Require that the MTA investigate trends in outages for all the newly-installed escalators;
5. Establish a procedure that if only one escalator is working in a bank that it be redirected to carry passengers from the station to street level.