No elevator for you! (bitchcakesNY's flickr).

Elevators and escalators on the subway are notoriously bad—just ask some of the people who have been stuck in them—and yet, according to a draft report the Daily News got its paws on, the MTA still doesn't have a firm grasp on how to keep them running. Which makes us feel great about their "plans" to get garbage off subway platforms faster!

The News says they've gotten a peek at the MTA inspector general's report on a $2.7 million project started in 2007 that was meant to improve the maintenance and reliability of elevators and escalators. And it is a doozy. "Despite public concern, media attention and demands for improvement by the MTA Board, elevators and escalators remain a problem," the report says.

So what are some of the things the report focuses on? Well, to start, it turns out that some "straphangers stuck in elevators may have been trapped longer than necessary because a new monitoring system was plagued by false alarms," which meant that staffers at the MTA's Elevator and Escalator department stopped even paying attention.

Making things worse, the automated system has a knack for failing to send warnings during real breakdowns (there were 208 entrapments in the first six months of 2010). So instead workers simply wait "for notification from trapped riders or other transit workers before sending mechanics to the scene." And it turns out that monitoring equipment was disconnected at some elevators, "including some with the highest number of entrapments!"

Also, some "inspection and maintenance work reported as having been done may not have been performed." Which sort of explains why the report found that "Managers didn't know false alarms were a problem and wrongly thought staff was immediately dispatched."

"These are critical issues that must be dealt with," Inspector General Barry Kluger told the Daily News. And to that end the MTA says it is finally going to get its act together. To start it is going to create a chief of elevators and escalators to improve maintenance and reliability of the equipment. In the meantime, if you believe them, the MTA tries to keep track of currently down elevators and escalators on its website.