Metro forgets how the ADA works.

It took me two hours tonight to get from Hollywood/Vine to Wilshire/Normandie. I think I probably could have walked it in that time. Not kidding. Two hours.

I leave H&V at roughly 10pm, maybe 10:15. Take the red line to Wilshire/Vermont, try to get on the elevator, and find that the cleaning crew has taken over the elevator with a large piece of equipment. Wanting to make the transfer, we try and fit on but the cleaning folks refuse to make room, breaking the outer door to elevator WVL-1. WVL-2 has been broken in its entirety for weeks now. I make it downstairs, see two Hollywood trains go by until Metro finally has the courtesy at about 11:15pm to tell the folks via loudspeaker at Wilshire/Vermont that the Koreatown trains are leaving from the upper platform. This is news to some 20 or 30 people, who crowd the stairs and the only remaining elevator.

Thanks for putting notices up, for putting it on the rail status page, and for making announcements on the train. Any of those things could have saved all of those confused people from waiting so long.

I finally go to the upper platform, and leave W/V around 11:30. I get to Normandie, go to the lobby level, and find the sole elevator from lobby to street, WNL-1, out of service. Great. I tell yet another cleaning lady, and say that I’ve probably missed the last train - she informs me that there’s one more train back downtown. So back to W/V I go.

I get to W/V again around 11:50, only to find that now BOTH elevators WVL-1 and WVL-2 are out of service. I call Metro (thank God that Helio has a strong signal in LA, I usually have cell phone service in subway station lobbies), only to be told that the elevator is being manually held in emergency mode on the Courtyard level by… wait for it… the incompetent cleaning people. She apparently pages the cleaning people via the elevator, who send it back down. I get upstairs at about 12:00 and proceed to walk home, getting home about 10 minutes ago. At 12:10. After leaving my friends’ apartment near Hollywood/Vine at 10pm. Had any of this information been made available to me while I waited on the platform at Hollywood/Vine, I simply would have walked home from Wilshire/Vermont and been home in time for the 11pm news.

This will all be going in an angry letter to Metro. It’s inexcusable that they would pay so little attention to elevator maintenance, inexcusable that a cleaning crew would insist on priority over the elevator over a disabled passenger, and even more inexcusable that they would allow their same moronic cleaning crews to hold the only functioning elevator at a major transfer station out of service for their own convenience. The whole mess was unacceptable on more levels than I can count.