The record.

The maps were always about whether you can get to the platform. Today we start writing the outdoor half too — the doors, the hills, the plazas — for a short set of trips planned for wheelchair riders. Not a tourism guide. Not a promise that every entrance is step-free. Just the part after the cabin that official boards leave out.

Every station also gets its own status page now: a plain URL you can share or find when you search the station name. The trips live somewhere else on purpose. One page answers “is the elevator working.” The other answers “what happens after you get outside.”

Photos are chosen for the place named on the page. A wrong country or a painting close-up does not get to stand in. Pin my station stays on the device — open the map, find your stop first next time, clear it when you want. Privacy finally says that out loud, and stops inventing an email we do not have.

Smaller things landed the same day: Source keeps still while you read How we count, and the homepage city list gets a quieter hover. None of that changes how outages are counted.

Philadelphia opens. Market-Frankford and Broad Street, including the Spur. SEPTA’s elevator list is daily, thin, and honest about what it is: one match is one outage, not a count of what still works. There is no escalator feed. If a station’s own stops disagree on wheelchair access, we do not call it accessible — City Hall is that case. Regional Rail stays off this map even when it appears on SEPTA’s elevator page.

Portland MAX opens the same day. TriMet only lists elevators at a short set of stops. Everywhere else that is still wheelchair accessible, we write it that way: accessible, no elevator. An empty escalator column is not a green light.

Terms name both agencies and point at their own pages. The WMATA notice stays where it belongs.

Chicago L joins the others. CTA does not hand us a neat elevator inventory, so one accessibility alert is one outage — not “all elevators down,” not a guess at escalators. State/Lake is closed for reconstruction until 2029. That is not an elevator story, and we do not dress it up as one.

The homepage count had been soft. Today it means what it says: stations reporting an elevator outage. A station that was never wheelchair accessible still shows on the map; it just stops inflating the number. How we count gets its own page so that sentence has somewhere to live.

Origin goes up as a story, not a about page. One brother designed and built the site. The other wrote no code and keeps the espresso coming. Tips and card statements go to Sunday Robbo. Claude and Cursor helped. The joke stays.

The spark is named properly. Shane Hryhorec is linked the right way. An earlier draft had pointed at Instagram. That was wrong, and it is fixed the same day.

Terms and Privacy get rewritten so they match the product. This site is independent. Where we disagree with an agency, the agency wins. Missing escalator data is not a claim that those escalators work. Liability sits in full capitals on purpose — not fine print. Privacy stops promising “never.” Practices can change; the date at the top is the version that counts. Near me still asks first, and still does not ship your coordinates with the status check.

The homepage stops being only DC. Boston T and SF BART open beside it. DC moves to its own address. Each city still points back at the official elevator page.

Coverage is written where you can see it. DC and Boston can talk about escalators. BART cannot, so San Francisco says elevators only — an empty list there is not a green light. A station that was never wheelchair accessible counts as a problem, not only a broken cabin.

Near me asks before it reads the browser. The coordinates stay on the device. Buy us a coffee: tips go to Sunday Robbo — the studio behind this map and our other sites made to help people who need them. Ko-fi and Stripe handle the money. A tip is a tip. It does not buy uptime or a promise the map is right.

Just after 2:35 AM, the first version goes live untouched. Official launch is the DC Metro page, before any of the later edits. That build is tagged and kept on its own branch so the night cannot erase it.

The same morning, the map starts sharing one WMATA snapshot for about five minutes instead of asking again for every visitor. If WMATA goes quiet, the last snapshot stays and is labeled. If there is nothing to show, the page does not invent a green light. It says it cannot tell, and links to WMATA.

A mark on the map means elevator trouble. An escalator can be down while the cabin still runs; that station should not look sealed. Origin, Terms, and search settle around the edges. The agency notice sits in the footer where it belongs: this can change, and the official page is one click away.

The project starts in the mid-autumn of 2025. There is no day written down. The broken elevator, the commute, and the decision to show the truth before someone reaches the stairs had already been turning over long before any repository existed.

That is why a working first version could exist before morning. The question was already the product. The tone was already blunt. What the site would refuse to pretend was already decided. None of that has a commit. Mid-autumn is remembered. The day is not, and this record will not invent one.