Supporting material.
Video: “The Unseen Inefficiency of Escalator Etiquette”
1. Half of all escalator injuries of people under the age of 65 are caused by walking on escalatorsThe uneven weight distribution cause by people standing to one side causes more frequent breakdowns
In high-traffic times, reserving half the escalator for walkers decreases the average speed of users
Resolved: Everyone should be standing still on escalators. It is a technology more suitable for riders, not walkers
Except when they get off. Then, NOBODY should be standing still (one of my pet peeves).
During normal working times, I ride escalators many times a day. And every time, I think about your #3 there, because I have heard it before.
Because in high-traffic times, my speed is increased if one side is reserved for walkers and I can get to the turnstiles faster than a slow group of people and get out of the parking lot faster.
A standing-only policy increased hourly escalator capacity in London by 27 percent. That’s not insignificant.
It makes sense to increase the average speed and capacity rather than slow down the 75 percent of people who stand in order to allow 25 percent of the people who walk to move faster than everyone else.
This is not a serious statement. Everyone using an escalator has somewhere to be. The time saved from walking as opposed to standing is not significant.
Escalators aren’t designed to give people exercise. It makes no sense to allow 25 percent of users to get more exercise on a device not designed for it, balanced against the negatives.
Your individual speed is increase by decreasing everyone else’s speed. That’s not a reasonable tradeoff.
The many benefit far more from an all-standing policy than the few do from being allowed to walk:
That seems true. My stop has a long line of people waiting for the “standing” side of the escalators while nobody is waiting for the “walking” side. I’d rather just stand myself, but I’m not waiting an extra minute to do it.
Right, but if more people walked, there would be an overall improvement in time in the system, since there would be fewer or no people waiting for the non-walking line, right?
So, it seem like it’s the lazy people slowing everything down (leaving aside the small percentage of people who cannot walk due to some physical disability). If more people walked, leaving no line for the lazy side, average time in the system should go down.
This seems like a London problem to me, because, at least in NY, you’ll never have people waiting for a standing side – they would just go to the the other side and stand and you’ll get your desired end-point of me missing my connection.
There are about 3 deaths and 6,800 serious injuries due to escelators per year in the US. I couldn’t find a breakdown due to age. Half of a limited age group seems like we’re talking about 3,000 total injuries per year.
Seems like the solution to this would be to ban standing and allow people to walk on both sides.
My understanding is that by packing the escalator with people standing it is able to more more people faster. I haven’t seen a study where everyone walks. It seems if you crammed twice as many people on there and they all walked up then the average speed would be even faster.
So the solution should be standers are banned and everyone moves on both sides.
Banning standing on escalators is clearly a satirical position to take. Banning walking isn’t comparable.
Meh, if I was god-king I would ban standing and make the people who couldn’t or didn’t want to walk ride the elevator.
All the new escalators they put up in NY have a voice saying over and over to stand, do not run or walk, on the escalator. Seems to do no good.
How would you ban it?
One way is to do what you do for jaywalking. Start issuing citations.
Also, for some period of time, send employees in pairs to stand abreast, to make people get used to standing.
Escalators are frikking meat grinders. Walking on them demonstrates a cavalier disregard for basic safety.
They should invent a special kind of ‘safety escalator’, with fewer moving parts, possibly with stationary steps. They could call them ‘stationarys’. They would be reserved exclusively for people who wish to walk up and down them; standers would be required to use the escalators only in order to give the walkers exclusive right-of-way.
I’m a “walks on the escalator” guy, so you’re going to have a tough time getting me to vote for your resolution regardless, Acsenray. But I’m willing to listen. Critical for my support will be an exemption for lower-traffic times.
We’re only applying the rules to crowded escalators – like when your subway dumps out scores of people during morning rush hour – yeah? The throughput argument doesn’t apply unless there are enough people to cause a queue at the entrance, so I should be cool to walk in other circumstances.
Oredigger77 is right: the social default should be for all users to walk, with those unable taking the elevator. Corollary: if you can walk, then don’t use elevator, which is reserved for those unable to walk. (Alternative rules would be in effect when no elevator is nearby.)
Now we’re talking. My strong preference is to take the stairs, even when an empty escalator is nearby. If I was god-king, all escalators would have accompanying stairs. But architects have really screwed this up; a frustratingly high percentage of escalators lack a parallel staircase. This sin seems to be committed more often in buildings from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. I dunno if architects of that era deemed stairs too old fashioned or what.
If you’ve got so many people moving through that there’s literally a line to wait to get on the escalator, then the problem isn’t people standing or people walking. It’s that you don’t have enough escalators.
It’s not a ride at Disneyland, move your ass if you can.
This and the 75/25 example are comical for anyone who has made a transfer at Pentagon. Standers are the rare, hated exception.
Funny coincidence. Sometimes the escalators break down, and then they resemble exactly what you are describing here. Maybe engineers could use broken escalators as a a draft concept of your “stationarys” idea.