Why this exists.

The Fine Print of a Broken City

A broken subway elevator isn't just a minor inconvenience—for parents with strollers, wheelchair users, or travelers with heavy luggage, it's a closed door. Yet, official transit apps often bury this crucial information in fine print or use polite, corporate jargon to sugarcoat completely inaccessible infrastructure.

We got tired of the guessing game. So, we built istheelevatorworking.com.

Midnight, Espresso, and a Beautiful Irony

We're a brother duo based in the DC area. Under Sunday Robbo, we build small sites that try to make the world a little fairer for people who need them — this map is one. One of us is a Principal Product Designer who, out of sheer frustration with his daily commute, somehow ended up architecting and coding this entire platform himself.

Then there's his brother: a recent Computer Science grad currently navigating the AI-apocalypse tech job market by slinging drinks at Starbucks. Did the actual CS major write a single line of code for this civic tech project? Absolutely not.

There's a beautiful irony to our setup: AI might be making that job hunt harder right now, but we are actively using those exact AI coding assistants to help build a tool that protects everyday human rights. But let's be clear—even with AI co-pilots like Claude and Cursor helping with the heavy lifting, architecting an entire Next.js platform, wrestling with messy transit APIs, and obsessing over every UI detail as a solo builder still took an absurd amount of time, countless late nights, and sheer willpower.

So while one of us and the AI handle the codebase, the other operates as our Chief Coffee Officer, providing the critical infrastructure required to keep this site running: unlimited espresso, brutal reality checks, and keeping morale high during late-night debugging sessions.

The Spark, from around the world.

Building something from scratch that actually helps people has always been a shared dream of ours. We've always wanted to create tools that people can rely on to make their world even just a little bit better.

A major spark for this project came from watching Shane Hryhorec on his YouTube channel, Wheel Around the World. After a swimming pool accident in 2007 left him paralyzed, Shane didn't just passively accept an inaccessible world—he actively fought to change it, founding a wheelchair company and charities to create accessible beaches. Seeing his raw, unfiltered documentation of navigating foreign cities and facing severe accessibility challenges made us look at our own backyard. We realized we could use our own skills—design, technology, and a bit of stubbornness—to make a real dent in the world, starting with our local transit system.

Designing for the Unapologetic Truth

We believe that transparent, unfiltered information is what drives a city forward. When an elevator is out of service, or when a station is fundamentally built without ADA access ("Stairs Only"), you deserve to know instantly. We use blunt, high-contrast design to call out failing infrastructure and hold transit authorities accountable.

No fluff. No excuses. Just raw, honest data built by two brothers (and a little bit of AI) trying to make your daily commute a little more predictable, accessible, and fair.

Our Promise

Knowing whether you can get in and out of a station is free, forever. No sign-up, no paywall, no ads between you and the answer. No money will ever change what the map says.

Get in Touch

For partnerships, press, research questions, or a correction, write to editors at istheelevatorworking dot com. It is a small studio, so replies can take a few days.

Found a security problem? Email the same address, and please give us time to fix it before you share it. This site does not run a bug bounty and does not pay for reports.