New York City Transit hopes to improve the poor qualities of the subway by investing $1 billion to build new escalators and elevators for the underground system.

"There are a lot of problems," Howard H. Roberts Jr., the president of New York City Transit, said to The New York Times. "We've laid the problems out, and we're addressing them one by one, and we are making progress, I think, across a wide variety of fronts."

The plan, with one of the largest subway investments in city history, aims to make the transit system more accessible for the disabled, prevent escalators from going out of service as often as they currently do, and avert the chance that elevators will break down with passengers inside. Officials hope to accomplish this by the end of the next decade.