The Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s emergency exits are a gauntlet of dangers, with crumbling walls, exposed wiring — and even broken handrails on paths 30 feet above ground, a scathing new audit found.
Officials with MTA Inspector General Daniel G. Cort’s office inspected 163 locations and found a whopping 41% needed immediate or near-future repairs — while 54% of the 65 emergency exit stairwells reviewed were plagued by “serious defects,” according to the audit released Thursday.
“I saw first-hand some of the issues highlighted in our audit during site visits, and I am deeply concerned about the poor conditions we observed,” Cort said in a statement.
Exits from the subways and MTA facilities were rife with tripping hazards, obstructions, nonexistent lighting, corrosion, the audit found.
Inspectors found subway emergency exits were littered with hazards, including a hatch that failed to open from the inside, structural defects with concrete ceilings and walls reported as “severely cracked and decrepit.”
Emergency exit paths need safe and unobstructed emergency exit doors, stairwells, walkways alongside elevated tracks and walkways in subway tunnels, according to auditors. The paths can be used by riders during an emergency or by workers for repairs and inspections.
Inspectors also found leaks and poor drainage were leading to corrosion and structural damage.
Elevated tracks were even more perilous — with loose or broken handrails sometimes stretching more than 100 feet, the audit said.
Even in areas 30 feet above street level, the handrails were so loose that “if significant weight were to be put on the handrails, they would not hold,” according to the report. The report did not say where the most dangerous handrails were located, but noted loose handrails occurred more often in Queens and Brooklyn than the Bronx.
Subway exits often contained “filthy or broken” light fixtures providing poor or sometimes no lighting at all, according to the audit. In some instances, auditors reportedly had to navigate by flashlight.
The report noted the most immediate pitfalls had been fixed by MTA workers by the time the findings of the audit were published nearly a year later.
MTA hadn’t discovered the issues themselves because of shoddy inspections, the report alleged.
Only 13% of the serious defects identified by OIG had been previously caught by MTA inspectors, and MTA inspection reports are vague — devoid of detail or photos to help repair crews know what they should be working on, according to the report.
When issues were reported by MTA inspectors, the issues were rarely resolved in a timely manner, according to the report. About 76% of “serious defects” reported by MTA inspectors did not receive a response from repair crews within the 90-day period required by NYC Transit policy, the report states.
The MTA refused the auditors recommendations for a variety of reasons. In some instances the transit giant flat out disagreed with OIG’s recommendations and in other instances the MTA claimed current policies and procedures were already sufficient.
MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber speaking at an unrelated press conference Thursday said the OIG’s report “conflated” some “temporary conditions,” such as a chained emergency exit door and cracks in the concrete.
Lieber said an evacuation last week when 3,500 subway riders were stranded underground for nearly three hours after two F trains in Brooklyn lost power in between stations proved the emergency exits “functioned properly.” He blamed the hours-long evacuation with no air conditioning on the fire department.
“We’re really attentive to emergency exits, and we had to use them just this week, and they functioned properly. And we’re working on making sure the fire department can help us get people — god forbid — out of emergency exits faster,” Lieber said.
The MTA promised in its December response to the report that all the hazards at emergency exits would be fixed by Q2 2025.
MTA also agreed with recommendations to improve its inspection process and noted its 2025-2029 Capital Plan includes $100 million for emergency exits, “the most significant investment in emergency exits to date,” the response said.
But the MTA rejected a recommendation from OIG to assign responsibility to specific workers to inspect handrails because engineers already do “visual inspections,” according to the report.
The embarrassing report comes as the MTA is under fire for rush-hour power outages, an unpopular Manhattan congestion toll and looming fare hikes that’ll boost subway and bus fares up to $3.
The agency has also been skewered for questionable spending like a plan to pay a contractor up to $1 million for a report on the mindset of fare jumpers.
