In settling a long-running federal lawsuit against the MTA for its very poor maintenance of the limited number of elevators in the subway, the agency promises to do better in keeping its lifts working and to let passengers know when they are not. This should be entirely possible, as any New Yorker who lives or works in an elevator building knows, but the MTA has struggled with it for years as passengers with disabilities have suffered.

It was on March 23, 1857, when Elisha Otis installed the world’s first commercial passenger safety elevator in the E. V. Haughwout Building, a five-story loft at Broadway and Broome. That was six years before the world’s first underground train, London’s Metropolitan Railway began on Jan. 10, 1863. So elevators even predate subways, yet the MTA had to be sued to provide this basic........

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