By Anya Schiffrin
Additional reporting by Maya Tadmor

I’ve lived on the Upper West Side most of my life, and I like to think I know the neighborhood and the city well. But lately I’ve been looking at both a little differently, seeing them through the eyes of others who have difficulties navigating our sidewalks, subways, and airports.

The person who opened my eyes to the inaccessibility of the UWS is Emily Muller, a Columbia University graduate and journalist with distal muscular dystrophy. Her illness causes muscle weakness that is progressive. Walking long distances, especially on uneven, cracked sidewalks, is becoming increasingly difficult, as is climbing stairs.

“Navigating the [campus] itself was challenging due to the abundance of steps,” Emily told me. ‘When I do take stairs, it’s hard and I go up one step at a time and usually need a friend to carry my things, shield me from foot traffic, and let me use their arm as a de facto railing. By my second year at Columbia, I had just about stopped using stairs entirely due to increasing weakness and exhaustion.”

I am a professor at Columbia and got to know Emily, 25, because she was the editor of our student publication, The Morningside Post.

But while Emily was brainstorming story ideas or carefully editing my own copy, I had no idea how hard it was for her to get around. She rejoiced when she got a UN internship, but because there is no elevator at the 116th Street 1 train station, she had to take the bus to the UN. With traffic and construction, it took two hours to get there and two more to get back.

Muller’s favorite spots on the UWS include Arts and Crafts, Book Culture, Suite (especially on karaoke night), but she has pretty much given up on going out with friends. “I stay home due to public transportation being so difficult! I’m a really social person and love going out, so this is a bummer,” Emily said.

Trips to specialized physical therapy are hard because the nearby subways are inaccessible, even the ones near the hospitals! 168th Street has elevators but still lots of stairs to get to the platform, and 116th Street has no elevator. The M4 bus is so slow that it exhausts her. When spring 2024  graduation was moved to a new location because of the protests, Emily missed half of it due to the stairs.

Worst of all are NYC airports: “In the spring, I didn’t celebrate Easter with my family in Illinois and skipped several long weekends away because the stress and planning of receiving travel assistance just didn’t feel worth it,” she said.

That was something I was already learning about from my mother who has started getting a wheelchair at the airport when she goes to see friends and family in Europe and England.

Here is how it works here: passengers are told to book in advance; when you get to the airport check-in desk, they call for a wheelchair and wheelchair pusher. It can take 30-60 minutes for them to arrive. Amazingly, some terminals don’t even have a place to sit while you wait.

These are things Emily is all too familiar with. “I always worry that I will miss my flight. I try to plan ahead and get to the airport early, but there is uncertainty about whether a chair will come,” she said. “Often, if I don’t see a chair, I wander around the airport looking  for someone to help me,” she added.

As I travel, I’ve struck up conversations with people waiting for wheelchairs, in wheelchairs, and pushing wheelchairs. One time at JFK I met a pusher from Bangladesh who said he’d been a journalist but received death threats and so moved to New York and was applying for asylum.

The pushers have told me how hard pushing is on their backs and their feet, and in New York their wages are only about $18 an hour. Usually there aren’t enough wheelchair pushers to meet demand, so sometimes they push two at a time – or push one and leave a second passenger waiting. This practice led to a lawsuit in 2011. In Lopez vs JetBlue, a passenger sued when she missed a connection because JetBlue allegedly “failed to provide timely wheelchair assistance.” (I’ll explain the legal aspects below.)

As someone who always wants to know how we can improve life in New York City, I’ve pondered the problem, and in one foreign airport I saw what looks like a solution. In Milan’s airport several times this summer, I saw electric wheelchairs that move quickly and have room for the wheelchair pusher to ride on the back of the chair. It’s better for everyone: the wheelchair rider gets around faster, and the wheelchair pushers are less likely to injure themselves.

We tracked down and called the Milan-based wheelchair company, Surace, which turned out to be a family business. Alessandro Surace and Michela Serra told us that their rechargeable chairs cost about $5,000, and they supply airports throughout Europe and in Istanbul.

“We have received numerous expressions of esteem and appreciation from many of these airports,“ said Michela, director of corporate communications for Surace, in an interview.

Because the chairs are electric, they’re easier to use; you don’t need a lot of strength to work as a chair pusher, so presumably more people could qualify to work as wheelchair pushers.

So, why don’t we have electric wheelchairs at JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark? It took many weeks to get an answer to this question. At first no one responded to  dozens of messages left with airlines, labor unions, the Port Authority, and the subcontractors the airlines hire to handle wheelchair travel in the United States.

One person who did respond was Upper West Side disability rights expert Sasha Blair-Goldensohn, who is part of the class action lawsuit that is helping get working elevators into the city’s subway stations. He said a problem with airport access is that travel is not considered a basic civil right.

“Going to school is a civil right, going to the park is a civil right, flying is not a civil right,” Goldensohn said in a phone interview. “I should be able to go to a conference like everyone else, but not being able to doesn’t generate the same sympathy.”

Indeed, the courts have upheld this view. “All circuits have excluded airports and aircrafts from ADA accessibility suits,” said Mandeep S. Minhas, a lawyer who specializes in state and federal securities legislation.

So what is the solution? David Michaels, former assistant director of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration from 2009-2017, said it could be done very simply: “The Port Authority could mandate the electric wheelchairs. They run the three airports in New York.”  The Port Authority didn’t grant the Rag an interview on the issue, instead passing the buck to the airlines, which never responded to the Rag’s queries.

The famous economist, Mariana Mazzucato has written extensively on procurement policies and her pathbreaking book The Entrepreneurial State describes the role that government can play in promoting innovation. Dr. Mazzucato’s parents were Italian and she flies through Milan airport regularly, so I texted her for her thoughts. She replied that requiring procurement of electric wheelchairs would be a good way to help promote disability access.

“We would never have gotten to the moon without a new approach to procurement. NASA realized this early on,” she wrote. “Now is the time to normalize innovation for social issues…outcomes-oriented procurement can help us tackle our biggest challenges while driving growth and creating opportunities for business.”

After multiple emails to all of the subcontractors who handle wheelchair assistance at New York area airports, I heard back from Swetha Sharma, director of external communications for Prospect Aviation Services. Since 2013, Prospect has had the contract for wheelchair services at Newark Airport.

Sharma, a former CNN journalist, said that often it’s the airlines, not the subcontractors, that are responsible for buying the equipment. Though she did not have statistics for Newark airport, she said Prospect provides wheelchair services to approximately 40 million people a year in airports across the country. During peak travel times, like July 4th weekend or Thanksgiving, the company serves between 10,000-15,000 airport passengers a day.

“It would be extremely expensive to buy electric wheelchairs for that volume of people,” said Sharma. “We think it will happen, but we don’t see electric replacing manual in the near future in the U.S.” In part, he added, because European regulations are tougher.

Those regulations may turn out to be helpful for Emily. Though she says she still loves New York, she is planning to move to London. She’s hoping it will be easier to get around there.

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