Angelo Muredda has lived above College Station since 2008 but had never caught the train there — until last week. The English professor and film critic was finally able to use the station connected to his apartment for the first time in 18 years. Why? The TTC had finally installed an elevator at one of the city’s busiest subway stations.
As a wheelchair user, Muredda requires an elevator to reach the subway platform. “A lot of my life is spent planning transit routes on the fly based on which stations have elevators, and which elevators are currently running,” Muredda says. “Being able to rely on College Station, even if it’s only working most of the time, will make a huge difference in my daily life.” Muredda can now spend less time travelling longer distances in conditions that can wear out his wheelchair or leave him stuck in heavy rain or snow that his tires can’t get through.
The lack of an elevator at College Station resulted in constant, frustrating and time-consuming Kafkaesque detours over the years. “I’ve often had to ‘walk’ south in order to catch a train that will then head north, often passing College Station, where I could have started in the first place if it had been accessible,” he says. “On the way home, I’ve had to pass over the station I live above to the closest accessible one to the south, then I’ve had to backtrack 15 minutes in winter weather or rain.”
The 2005 Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) established Jan. 1, 2025, as the target date for achieving accessibility under the legislation. Plans for College Station began in 2016, and elevator construction began in 2020. “With the AODA, it’s the law. I don’t think a lot of this happens without the legal force of the AODA, given the tight budgets the TTC has had to work with and the lack of appetite in city council to tackle ambitious solutions to systemic issues like inaccessibility,” Muredda says. “It hasn’t really felt like a priority.”
According to TTC spokesperson Stuart Green, installing elevators at College Station presented some unique challenges. “Retrofitting older stations with elevators is complex engineering and construction work involving road closures and other complicating factors,” Green said. “In this case, we were installing three new elevator banks between street level and the two platforms, and we also added a second exit, which required coordination with third-party property owners (College Park), adding to the complexity.”
While Muredda may now be able to use his home station, others remain inaccessible to him. Green confirmed that four stations still do not have elevators: King, Museum and Islington were forecast to be completed by the end of the year, while Old Mill was slated for 2028.
It’s crucial to have a fully accessible system so that all riders can take full advantage of it, says Andrew Pulsifer, executive director of transit advocacy group TTCriders. “It’s especially important since the TTC is trying to get as many WheelTrans users to use conventional transit through a system called the Family of Services,” he says. Pulsifer, who attended the TTC’s Annual Accessibility Forum this week, said riders from across the city asked TTC staff directly about the accessibility of the system. “There, riders from all over the city asked questions directly to TTC staff about the accessibility of the system. It was clear from that forum that the TTC cares about making sure their system is accessible, but that there is still a lot of work left to be done,” he says. “For people who rely on elevators, an outage can mean having to travel well out of their way to find another accessible station, or not being able to make their trip at all.”
As Muredda points out, however, any station can potentially become inaccessible to him at any time if its elevator goes out of service. He says multiple overlapping elevator outages in the morning and mid-to-late afternoon are pretty common, including situations where both St. George and Bloor–Yonge are out of commission at the same time. “A lot of my time on the TTC is spent on my phone checking elevator statuses and planning alternative paths to my destination in the event of an outage,” he says. “At which point I’m often left scrambling within the system to figure out an alternative route to where I’m going — or forced to delay or cancel.”
For now, Muredda is elated that he can use the subway station downstairs at long last. He says his partner jokingly quoted Gloria Stuart’s character from “Titanic,” saying, “It’s been 84 years…” “It hasn’t quite been that long for me,” he says. “But it’s felt like it.”
