Cities Aren’t Built for Parents

Malaysia Goodson was just 22 when she died. She fell down a flight of stairs in a Midtown Manhattan subway station on Monday evening and was found unconscious and unresponsive at the scene, her 1-year-old daughter—who’d been tucked in a stroller and was still alive—beside her.

As of Thursday morning, the cause of Goodson’s death was still unknown, though a spokeswoman for the city’s medical examiner wrote in an email that a preexisting health condition appears to have contributed to her fall. Regardless, the accident has drawn attention to a problem disability-rights advocates from to have fought for years to little avail: The country’s public-transportation systems provide few accommodations for those who struggle to navigate the city in which they reside, for whatever reason. Maybe someone has a musculoskeletal disease that forces him into a wheelchair, or a mental-health condition that makes getting around safely difficult; maybe a person is blind or deaf or simply feeling off. Maybe someone is a manual laborer tasked with transporting unwieldy packages,