Sadiq Khan: Some Tube stations will 'never' have step-free access
Sadiq Khan: Some Tube stations will 'never' have step-free access
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Sir Sadiq Khan has admitted it will “never be the case” that every Tube station in London will have step-free access. The mayor suggested this was due to the Victorian design of some of them, which makes retrofitting lifts either impossible or extremely expensive.
The issue was raised at Mayor’s Question Time last week by Andrew Boff, a Tory member of the London Assembly, after he asked why Highgate station still doesn’t have a lift, “bearing in mind its poor record of escalator breakdowns and its inaccessibility for people using wheelchairs”.
Sir Sadiq said he would look into Highgate’s particular circumstances, but explained there is a set of criteria which is followed when deciding whether to invest in step-free access at stations. All 180 stations without step-free access have been assessed by TfL against this criteria, including how deep the station is and the minimum number of lifts required. City Hall says this has allowed TfL to prioritise the stations that would benefit most from step-free access being added.
Addressing the issue of accessibility across the network in general however, the mayor went on to say: “The target is for us to go from [the current position of] a third of our Underground stations being step-free, to half by the end of this decade...
“In addition to the Underground leading the way - we’ve got the Overground, [with] 60 per cent of the stations there being step-free, all the tram stations being step-free, all 41 Elizabeth line stations being step-free, [and] 95 per cent of our bus stops being step-free as well.”.
