When BARTโs elevators donโt work, wheelchair users are pretty much stuck with one option: Take Muni to the nearest BART station with an elevator that does work.ย
Pete Bendix, a wheelchair user who commutes to the 24th Street BART station from his home near Glen Parkโs BART stop three days a week, has learned this the hard way.
On July 13, the elevator at the 24th Street stationโs southwest plaza โย the only elevator connecting street level and the station entrance gates โย closed for emergency repairs. Bendix first learned about the outage through an electronic update posted at the Glen Park station. He later read online that the station elevator would be up and running again by Aug. 10.
That seemed like a long time to Bendix. Maneuvering his wheelchair from his home to catch the 14 or 49 bus requires navigating a very steep hill, adding as much as 15 minutes to his commute each way. โIt takes time and it’s a little bit dangerous. I’m very careful, it’s quite steep,โ said Bendix. โAbove all, it just takes a lot of time.โ
Aug. 10 came and went, and the 24th Street BART elevator still wasnโt fixed. The deadline was pushed back again, and again, until it had been pushed back five times in total. It finally returned to service on Oct. 15, 94 days later.ย
BARTโs elevator issues are not new. In 2024, the agency settled a class-action lawsuit filed in 2017, which argued that BARTโs elevator maintenance was so bad that it qualified as โsystemic civil rights violations.โ
That lawsuit cited an earlier elevator lawsuit settlement, Cupolo v. Bay Area Rapid Transit, in which BART, in 1998, agreed to adequately maintain and promptly repair its elevators. After a promising start, the 2017 lawsuit said, BARTโs elevators had regressed to their pre-Cupolo condition.ย
The settlement was supposed to go into effect no earlier than June 1, 2024, or 90 days after the agency reached an average of 1.82 million weekly paid exits. It went into effect in 2024.ย ย
In the 2024 settlement, BART agreed to fix or upgrade 75 elevators in the system over the next 15 years, to stop scheduling routine escalator and elevator maintenance during commute hours, to try to inform the public within 15 minutes when an escalator or elevator goes out of service and to submit two reports a year tracking BARTโs compliance with the settlement.
In the latest available report, obtained by Mission Local, the 24th Street elevator is included in the agencyโs “elevator modernization prioritization 2026” list. Records show that the same elevator went through a 35-hour planned outage in December 2025 to repair a hydraulic valve and the door system.
The report states that BARTโs response time to elevator outages between December 2025 and May 2026 was within the one-hour goal set in the agreement.ย
Was the broken elevator at 24th Street BART in violation of the 2024 settlement?ย
Proving that BART is in violation of its obligations under the settlement is not easy. Rosie Bichell is an attorney at Legal Aid at Work whose work includes monitoring the BART consent decree. In the settlement, Bichell said, BART agreed to follow โreasonable best effortsโ as far as elevator maintenance was concerned.
The settlement defined โreasonable best effortsโ as actions that do not “result in a fundamental alteration in the nature of its services, programs, or activities, or that would impose undue financial or administrative burdensโ โ which gives BART a lot of wiggle room.ย
So far, there have not been any violations recorded under the settlement agreement, Bichell said. But, she added, an elevator being out for three months is pretty concerning. Scenarios like the elevator at 24th Street have to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, she added, and BART has yet to file its report covering the time period when the elevator was broken.ย
It is possible that the broken elevator could be a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, saidย Michelle Uzeta, the executive director at the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund. BARTโs elevator outages have been a longtime issue. โWhat the law does require is that a transit agency keep its accessible features in working order and fix them promptly when they fail,โย Uzeta said.
But, Uzeta added,ย โThere’s no bright-line rule for what does and does not constitute a violation of the ADA.โ The law recognizes that equipment breaks down and needs repair, and so length of the outage, frequency of an outage, reason for the outage (breakdowns because of neglect are more likely to count as violations) and how promptly BART carried out repairs would all have to be considered.ย
When the elevator on the southwest plaza at the 24th Street BART station went out, repairs did not take place every day, a BART spokesperson said.
The contractor doing the repair had a family emergency, which paused the work for two weeks. In addition to that delay, the repair itself was difficult and required โspecialized equipmentโ due to the “complexity of the underground conditions.โ
The repairs involved repairing an aging jack nearly 40 feet belowground, replacing a hydraulic tank unit and installing a submersible pump and motor. It also required two state inspections, each of which required a two-week advance notice once the paperwork for them was filed. Workers also did not work overtime, the BART spokesperson added.ย
Since January, the same elevator at 24th and Mission streets has been out of service for a total of 98 days, according to BART data obtained by Mission Local, which means that Bendix and other wheelchair users have not been able to use that station for one-third of the year.ย
Bendix is hoping that there wonโt be any more breakdowns for a while. Heโs excited, he said, that the elevator at the southwest plaza is back, for now.
You can find the most recent information about BART elevator outages here, and register for updates by text or using the BART app. Thereโs also an elevator status hotline at (510) 834-LIFT or (888) 2-ELEVAT.