If the scourge of rats and homicidal maniacs on the platform weren't doing it for you in the Subway Nightmares department, today we're adding a new item to your list of straphanger worries: Getting trapped in the elevator. The MTA maintains about 200 elevators throughout the subway system, but some perform better than others. So we put together the interactive chart below based on last year's MTA reports to show you which subway elevators are the most cursed.
The map pins all subway stations which had at least one elevator entrapment in 2012. The worst offenders are in Washington Heights, where four of five stations saw over 10 elevator entrapments. This little Pocket of Terror likely comes from Washington Heights', er, height — as the highest neighborhood in Manhattan, the Heights's subway tunnels run far below street level, forcing straphangers to rely more on elevators, which elevators themselves have to travel further distances.
Yankee Stadium also saw a high number of elevator entrapments, at 19. So next time you decide to go get drunk and yell for two hours with 50,000 strangers, consider taking the stairs to the train, unless you want to be drunk, yelling and packed into a 50-sq-ft glass chamber of doom with those strangers. Roosevelt Island — another deep subway — fared relatively well, with only five entrapments. Still, even one entrapment in a subway elevator is no walk in the park, as the following video demonstrates:
Naturally, some stations get more traffic than others. But differences in ridership don't seem to account for more elevator entrapments. Times Square, which gets 20 million more riders than any other station in the system, for example, had zero elevator entrapments last year. Whereas a station like Clark St., which has fewer than 2 million riders—about 3% of Times Square's ridership—had 10 entrapments.
