Read more about how Lift Communications helps serve our community
The past four weeks have kept us on the move.
LiftComm provided the emergency communication systems for four MTA elevator modernization projects, each now back in service for riders. The work took us from 14 St-Union Sq in Manhattan, to DeKalb Av in Brooklyn, up to 161 St-Yankee Stadium in the Bronx in time for the Yankees' home opener, and over to 59 St-Columbus Circle, one of the busiest transit hubs in the city.
Four stations. Three boroughs. One job for our team at every stop: make sure the phone inside every new elevator is ready the moment it goes into service.
People sometimes think of the elevator phone as an afterthought. It is not. It is the life safety system. When the doors close and something goes wrong, whether that is a mechanical issue, a medical emergency, or someone simply needing help, the phone is the only way to reach a dispatcher. In a high-traffic subway station, that phone might be the most important piece of equipment in the entire cab.
And it cannot just work for some riders. It has to work for everyone.
That is where ASME A17.1-2019 comes in. The 2019 code raised the bar on what an elevator phone is required to do. Older systems only needed to make a voice call. The new standard requires two-way text communication for riders who are hard of hearing, visual feedback so riders can confirm they have been heard, and redundancy so the system keeps working even when power or network fails. A lot of systems still in service across the country do not meet that standard. Every phone LiftComm installed at these four stations does.
Accessibility is the reason the MTA is doing this work in the first place. New elevators mean parents with strollers can get to the platform. They mean a senior who cannot take the stairs still has a way down. They mean a rider in a wheelchair can rely on the system to get where they are going.
But accessibility is only real if every piece of the system respects it. An elevator that works for a rider in a wheelchair but has an emergency phone that cannot communicate with a rider who is hard of hearing is not truly accessible. We build with that in mind. Voice, text, and visual feedback all live in the same phone because the people using them should not have to think about which features they get.
Not every building needs what we build. Plenty of elevator communication platforms on the market require the phone to connect through a third-party cloud, and for a lot of properties, that works fine.
But for the projects where it does not work fine, where the network has to stay secure, where routing life safety calls through an outside platform is not an option, that is where LiftComm belongs. Transit systems. Government buildings. Hospitals. High-security commercial properties. Anywhere the stakes of the network match the stakes of the life safety system itself.
Our architecture is on-premises and encrypted. The phones do not need to be tied to an outside cloud to operate. There is no third-party platform sitting between the phone and the people responding to the call. The building owner keeps full control of the data and the network, and the system is not dependent on someone else's infrastructure to function.
When a project team is evaluating an elevator communication platform and the requirements include "cannot introduce new cybersecurity exposure," that is when we get the call. That is the kind of work we are built for.
The MTA completed a record 39 elevator replacements in 2025, and the pace has continued into 2026. These four stations are part of that larger push to modernize the system and make it work for every rider.
For us, every station is another place in New York City where someone who gets on an elevator can know that help is there if they need it, whoever they are and however they communicate. That is the standard we hold ourselves to, and we are grateful to be part of a mission that holds itself to the same one.
If you have questions about elevator emergency communication, ASME A17.1-2019 compliance, or what a modern on-premises system looks like for your building, we would be glad to talk.
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