alt Hacker NewsI didn't know this but given the multiple: "This is an accessible station" alerts it makes sense. Hopefully this is something that can change soon.
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A bunch of the congestion fee $ is going towards more elevators (and maintenance).
Worth adding: "accessible" is a real-time status, not a fixed property. A station with an elevator is not the same as a station you can enter step-free today; an outage quietly takes it off the list for days, which is what those alerts are for. The data that would actually help riders is elevator status history, and almost nobody publishes it.
I check step-free routes against dated street-level imagery, and the failure mode is nearly always staleness rather than absence: a 2017 photo shows a staircase where a map said "short walk", a newer image shows a ramp the map still tags as steps. Same problem in transit, just with a maintenance crew instead of a construction crew.
The current plan aims to have the subway system 95% accessible by 2055.
<https://www.mta.info/project/station-accessibility-upgrades>
(Of the old US subway systems, MTA seems to be the most lackadaisical in actually making their system accessible.)