Idk how much of this is habit, but I’ve seen a bunch of parents carrying strollers up and down the passage and stairs between the 4/5/6 and the 7 at Grand Central even though there’s a working elevator
Replies
New life hack when you don’t have a whole day to spend at Coney Island and the kids are too young to know the difference.
aug 30, 2025, 7:48 pm • 0 0 • view
Having subwayed with a stroller: 1. the elevators are slower than any elevators I’ve ever seen anywhere else. 2. They are often lines of people waiting to use them. It’s painful to wait so long.
aug 31, 2025, 3:16 pm • 0 0 • view
The urine stench is a big turn-off.
aug 31, 2025, 3:17 am • 0 0 • view
From experience in DC, sometimes the elevators are inconveniently placed (and slow) and you really just wanna get out.
aug 30, 2025, 7:37 pm • 1 0 • view
Tbh if it’s two floors or less on the subway, I usually find it more convenient/faster to just carry the stroller up the stairs. Only really got screwed once, when the elevator at Lex / 53 EM was out of service (and so was the escalator) and I was carrying it up out of that crazy cavern 😩
aug 30, 2025, 8:52 pm • 2 0 • view
(Long line of people walking up the escalator behind me too, so I couldn’t stop, quads burning like crazy by the end of it…)
aug 30, 2025, 8:52 pm • 1 0 • view
it takes forever
aug 30, 2025, 7:39 pm • 3 0 • view
As someone who pushes a stroller and once used Grand Central, it's how annoying it is. You have to take like 4 elevators to get from the street to the platform for the LIRR. And the elevators aren't all close together.
aug 30, 2025, 10:44 pm • 0 0 • view
Every time I tell somebody who looks like they could use it that there’s an elevator at this or that station, it ends in embarrassment for me. I think they know, they just don’t wanna use it. Maybe in part because the MTA never goes out of their way to limit the number of elevator trips needed, …
aug 30, 2025, 8:32 pm • 9 0 • view
Some of us also just have a huge aversion to MTA maintained elevators and know to never gamble like that. Lose that gamble once, and never again play the game again.
aug 30, 2025, 9:09 pm • 3 0 • view
For a year or two I had to take the elevator and did often and I found them actually fairly well maintained. Sometimes slightly pee-smelling, but no worse than your average station, which we’ve already bought into. My complaints are: 1. Never any effort to build direct platform-to-street elevators
aug 30, 2025, 9:13 pm • 6 0 • view
90's "Mother F*cking TA" trauma is real.
aug 31, 2025, 11:16 am • 0 0 • view
2. For whatever reason (perhaps that they’re hydraulic?), they decelerated very slowly and so the last foot or two was veeeeery slow. 3. Lots of crowding at big stations. Basically this is the fault of relatively low frequencies – OPTO would fix this.
aug 30, 2025, 9:13 pm • 5 0 • view
The modernizations also take forever, but that’s an industry-wide issue that I can’t blame the MTA for.
aug 30, 2025, 9:14 pm • 4 0 • view
…e.g., by taking away street space or creating new fare control areas to get directly to the street.
aug 30, 2025, 8:32 pm • 8 0 • view
Except they are doing that in recent years!! Direct to platform elevators 🎉
aug 31, 2025, 2:36 am • 0 0 • view