SEPTA shut down elevators and escalators without warning. That’s not OK for people with disabilities.

On Tuesday night — when the Phillies were playing the Arizona Diamondbacks at home and just a few runs away from clinching a spot in the World Series — SEPTA announced, without warning, that it would be shutting down elevators and escalators at multiple stops along the El and Broad Street Line. This was, according to its posts on Twitter/X, “in anticipation of a Phillies celebration in Center City.”

That celebration, of course, did not occur. Regardless, SEPTA’s plan to turn off elevators and escalators was a slap in the face to people with disabilities. How were they supposed to get home from the game? What if someone with a wheelchair or another mobility aid wanted to access 13th Street Station?

SEPTA’s oversight shows that the disabled community in Philadelphia is too often an afterthought.

For SEPTA’s part, a spokesperson said that the agency shut down the elevators because of “some internal miscommunication.” The spokesperson added that SEPTA had not received reports of customers being unable to access the stations.

“We are now in the process of reviewing our plans for these events,” the spokesperson said, “as well as reviewing communications procedures.”

The population of people with disabilities in our city is not small. Over 17% of Philadelphians — approximately 246,000 of our neighbors — are disabled. Philadelphia has the highest disability rate among large U.S. cities. Disabled Americans are the largest minority group in our country.

For the last 14 years, I have been working for organizations that advocate for disabled Philadelphians, including Liberty Resources Inc., the grassroots advocacy group ADAPT, and Disabled in Action of Pennsylvania. It’s not as if what we are asking for — basic access to public transportation — is something new. Disabled Philadelphians have been asking for equal access to transportation for decades.

While it might seem inconsequential that three separate SEPTA station elevators and escalators were shut down in anticipation of a baseball celebration for a few hours, this action by SEPTA is part of a long-standing pattern in which the basic needs of people with disabilities who use public transit are ignored.

Disabled Philadelphians deserve to be able to use public transit, just as any able-bodied person does.

On Tuesday night around 9 p.m., if a wheelchair user traveled to an ADA-accessible station to get off at their stop, they would have faced a closed elevator. Then, they would have to return to the platform, wait for another train, and get off at the next accessible location. This is not a short or easy process.

Keep in mind, they would likely have been going out of their way to get to that accessible transit stop in the first place. As of last year, only 27% of stations on the Norristown High Speed Line were accessible, while only 89% of those on the Market-Frankford Line were. On the Broad Street Line, only 12 of 25 stations are accessible.

And this is not just a Philly problem. According to the Federal Transit Administration, about 20% of transit stations nationwide do not have elevators or ramps — 33 years after the Americans with Disabilities Act guaranteed equal opportunities to benefit from public transportation.

Purposely making multiple accessible SEPTA stations inaccessible by shutting down elevators and escalators is one example of a larger problem: The city does not consider people with disabilities a part of the community.

As an able-bodied person who travels around the city with friends who use mobility aids, I have seen firsthand how barriers along their routes can cause delays and cancellations. The Phillies don’t have to be close to winning the National League Championship Series for this to happen. Obstructions are a regular occurrence.

For example, I hear often that multiple buses will pass by a wheelchair user because the bus is full. When passengers are standing in the way of an accessible space, many people, including the driver, will not intervene. Some SEPTA kiosks are too tall and don’t have tilt-down options for people in wheelchairs, and not all kiosks have working speakers for people who are blind or low-vision. Despite numerous requests from deaf and hard-of-hearing members of the SEPTA Advisory Committee for Accessible Transportation, SEPTA has not installed video remote interpreting services at its main headquarters, 1234 Market St.

For people with visual impairments or deaf and hard-of-hearing folks, drivers are often not announcing stops, which means that a person who is blind won’t know if their stop is coming up. If the stops are not showing up correctly on the screen, a deaf or hard-of-hearing person can miss their stop, too. And if a bus driver does not stop at the curb, a person with a wheelchair will have to navigate — often through traffic — to find the nearest curb cut to get on the sidewalk.

Facing these barriers is tedious, and prompts many people with disabilities to rely on Uber and Lyft to get around. This is way more expensive — especially if someone is living on Social Security and trying to work, socialize, or just explore our beautiful city.

These issues are often unreported because fully reporting them requires more work in a situation that requires an excess of energy to begin with. And each person only has so many spoons.

On Tuesday night, when SEPTA shut down escalators and elevators, the ableism was felt in the community.

In the words of my coworker, Latoya Maddox, a leading Philadelphia disability rights advocate: “Phillies fans with disabilities, including people like me who use wheelchairs, ride SEPTA, too. SEPTA cannot deny us access to elevators at its transit stations. This violates our civil rights under the ADA!”

SEPTA can do better. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Lauren Alden is the director of independent living services at Liberty Resources Inc., an organization that advocates for full inclusion of people with disabilities in Philadelphia, Montgomery, Chester, and Delaware Counties.