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Elevators & Full Wheelchair Accessibility Now!


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RSVP Here: https://www.facebook.com/events/362957734401884/

Pack the Court August 1st at 9:00am 60 Centre St, New York, NY 10007-1401

Elevators & Full Wheelchair Accessibility Now!

We demand: Binding Legal Agreements with a timeline for Full System Accessibility

In the hallways of the court at 60 Centre St. on June 5, lawyers for disability rights activists declared an accessibility hearing “an unqualified success.” Disability activists had brought an anti-discrimination lawsuit against the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to require it to install elevators in every New York City subway station. Currently, only about 20 percent of the city’s 472 subway stations have at least one elevator. Even fewer if you consider that many subway stations have multiple subway lines, all of which are not accessible by elevator and a high percentage of MTA elevators are out of order at any one time.

The MTA had filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, which the judge denied, making it possible for the suit to go forward. One of the plaintiffs, Susan Dooha, executive director of the Center for Independence of the Disabled, declared: “We’re thrilled. We’re vindicated. We expect to proceed to trial, and we expect to win. The judge was well-founded in his legal decisions about why our case survives those efforts to dismiss it.”

Judge Hagler rejected the MTA’s contention that state law had supremacy over city law: “There has never been a decision from any court that has preempted the New York City Human Rights Law in the area of discrimination,” Hagler said. “There can never be a situation where the state would license any agency to discriminate against any individual.”

Since this ruling, Governor Cuomo wasted 4.1 million dollars to develop a subway reorganization plan that cuts transit jobs and does not include any additional access in the public transit system, a plan that was overwhelmingly approved at last week's MTA Board meeting NYC Mayor DiBlasio published his so-called 2019 Accessible NYC report which actually suggests that things are wonderful for New Yorkers with Disabilities. (SEE https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/mopd/downloads/pdf/accessible-nyc-2019.pdf )
Elevators & Full Wheelchair Accessibility Now! - Pack the Court August 1st at 9:00am

The case resumes on August 1. Disability rights groups and their allies including The Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled, the Center for Independence of the Disabled NY, Disabled in Action, The People's MTA, People's Power Assemblies, Transit Center, Rise & Resist Elevator Action Group, and Communications Workers of America(CWA) Local 1180 are scheduled to speak at a rally 9 am prior to the 10 am court hearing with the demand of Binding Legal Agreements with a timeline for Full System Accessibility.

Advocates will also be remembering Malaysia Goodson, the young African-American mother who in January fell to her death carrying her baby and stroller in a subway station with no elevators. They call her death preventable, arguing that she would be alive today if the 53rd Street station where she fell had been equipped with elevators. #JusticeForMalaysia.

In 1994 the MTA promised to build 100 subway elevators by 2020, that's only 4 per year!

On April 16, 1963, in his letter from a Birmingham jail, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote: For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in [our ears] with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

WE WANT ELEVATORS & FULL ACCESSIBILITY RIGHT NOW!!

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