Its not that North, or the other stations being touched as part of this project are inaccessible, per se. They just don't have redundancy or have gaps in accessibility and less than ideal travel paths. I.e., only one entrance / headhouse might have an elevator, and/or there's only a single elevator to each platform or the mezzanine, leading to the station/platform becoming inaccessible in the case of an elevator outage. That's the case at North Station, Davis and all of these stations being touched as part of this project. Its not an full scope accessible rebuild - its just making accessibility more reliable and fixing annoyances, and that logic is why every GLX station has either multiple elevators or an available path that doesn't require one.It’s remarkable that the North Station “superstation” is new enough that it post dates the ADA, and yet they need to touch it in the accessibility projects.
I would also point out that accessibility infrastructure also works for travelers with luggage.
If you expect travelers to routinely use public transit to access Logan or our major rail terminals, you need to provide good infrastructure for rolling suitcases.
BART is an oddity as accessibility goes - it was pre ADA, but disabled advocacy resulted in elevators being built with the original stations. It was ahead of its time in 1972, and far behind its time in 2022. The $2.4 billion Berryessa extension, opened in 2020, has only one unreliable elevator per station platform. (The parking garages have 4-6 each, though, because god forbid the suburbanites have to wait to get to their Tesla.)
Even the value-engineered GLX stations are better than that. Lechmere has three elevators across two headhouses, Gilman two across two, and Medford/Tufts and Magoun two in a single headhouse. Union and Ball only have one each, but both have a fully accessible non-elevator entrance as well. East Somerville should have an elevator to shorten the path, but it's not the worst ramp I've seen.
Is there any repair work activity happening here? Every time I've been through Copley I just see the fences up in front of the broken bits, and the wall seems to be collapsing inward more and more...In March, I happened to see some old tiles exposed during repair work at Copley. These were the original blue-and-white tile bands; they separated the granolithic floor from the terrazzo lower walls, and the terrazzo from the plaster upper walls.
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As I recall reading somewhere here, Back Bay is basically just barely land. there's apparently a lot of trapped water down there dating to the original landfill and apparently the buildings around here are on wooden stilts as a result. Any changes to the water table evidently goes poorly - When they renovated the station ~15 years ago, they managed to cause enough shifting to crack Trinity Church.Is there any repair work activity happening here? Every time I've been through Copley I just see the fences up in front of the broken bits, and the wall seems to be collapsing inward more and more...
I'd be curious to know a) the reasons for the settlement/shifting (something about the neighboring library?), and b) the timeline to address it, if any.