In many jurisdictions, escalators don’t actually meet the safety standards for stairs. Too steep and, you know, sharp and cutty. If an escalator is down waiting for repairs, it’s not usually legal to just let it be a staircase.
That being said, I’m walking. I feel like a lazy loser riding up.
It’s almost certainly not actually that dangerous (though I wouldn’t want to ride one with untied shoelaces). They cover up most of the nastier machinery, and toes are cheap.
Still though, the average staircase does indeed have fewer moving parts, and escalators were clearly designed to be stood on, Jetsons-style.
Absolutely correct. There are roughly 105 billion individual rides on escalators according to my second cite with 6,800 serious injuries according to my first though that also account for repair injuries. Which gives a high end injury rate of 0.006%.
Yep. And it’s the same in any major city with long escalators to public transport. As a tourist I’ve usually been happy to stand and let other people walk. If I’m in a rush for my plane, I appreciated being able to move faster.
It’s like proposing that all lanes on the road should be either fast lanes or slow lanes, not both.
Decreasing the average speed is not an issue, since some people are happy to go slower, and some want to go faster. The accident rate is not statistically significant.
Mall escalators in England are occasionally stand both ways, but they’re very short escalators. The escalators at most underground railways stations in Europe are longer than mall escalators. The escalator at Angel tube station in London is 200’ long. Standing there for ages would be annoying if you knew that there was the option of walking.
FWIW in London and a lot of other cities elevators are not an option at many stations, or they require going so far out of your way that it’s more travel required than just getting onto the escalator if you can. I don’t think the people saying escalators should be walking only were just taking the mick, I think they just haven’t used them very often outside malls.
This argument is based on the assumption that the value of time is identical for all riders. Obviously, this assumption is inapplicable if, for example, the escalator is at a subway station and some riders are simply exiting the system (low marginal value of haste) while others are transferring to a bus that has begun boarding (high marginal value of haste) – in that case, for the former to stand while the latter walk maximized the total utility achieved.
Thus making the problem moot as the chain of events (reporting that people’s taxes are being spent to hire people to stand abreast on subway escalators, leading to increased resistance to transit subsidies, leading ultimately to the end of the system) plays out.
Everywhere I’ve seen an escalator there’s an elevator nearby. Most of the people I see on escalators are walking. the remainder are slow walkers who bugger up the exit and make people walk around them which I suspect are where a lot of the accidents occur.
I don’t see why the rest world should have to suffer life in the slow lane. If you want to use the left side of the escalator then do what you just did to get there and walk.
For 100 years we had ramps at my city rail station. Then they replaced them with escalators. Faugh.
I’m sympathetic, but this is a classic case of “that which is not seen”. Your total journey time on the Tube isn’t massively affected by how long you spend going up the escalator. Much more significant is how long you have to wait for a train, and how long trains stop at stations. And this is absolutely driven by how long it takes to clear the platforms and escalators. London Underground could run empty trains through the system at 2 or 3 a minute quite easily. But if they try to empty a second train into a station where there’s still a mass of passengers making their way of the platform and bottlenecked at the bottom of the escalator, it would be exceptionally dangerous and unworkable. The faster you clear the platforms, the more trains you can run. The more trains you can run, the less time passengers spend waiting for one, and the more likely they are to be able to get on one when it comes.
The cost of banning walking is maybe 30s for c.40% of passengers. The benefit of running trains every 2 mins instead of 3 is 60s per 100% of passengers - that includes the walkers. More trains means less build up of passengers on platforms, so less time stopped for boarding. Maybe another 10s per 100% of passengers, including the walkers.
When LU tried this experiment at Holborn, thisis what they found: “An escalator that carried 12,745 customers between 8.30 and 9.30am in a normal week, for example, carried 16,220 when it was designated standing only.”
Bigger throughput = more frequent trains + shorter stops = quicker journeys for all. Including you. Quicker than you’d get for waiting longer for you train and walking up the escalator. But it doesn’t feel like that. Choosing to walk up makes you feel like you’re actively choosing to be quick. But this is illusory. It’s also a collective action problem. Despite all the above, I always walked up the escalator - because once you’re at the bottom of it, that’s how I you get to the top quickest, and there’s no point in just one person standing on the left. It has to be the new normal or it’s no good.
I think it’s an interesting finding that when escalator space is massively inadequate, you can improve thruput by requiring passengers to stand as close as possible, and not let anyone walk. But it’s a finding with limited applicability. For instance, at the airport, I’ve never observed a line to get on the escalator, and the marginal value of saving a few seconds varies enormously from person to person. So imposing that rule at the airport would be a significant net loss. And you should include in that loss the frustration of people who are worried about missing their flight and want to “do something” as well as the ones who actually do miss their flights.
The solution to escalator injuries is to have a more sensitive “jam” indicator and a more prominent “stop” button, not to make everyone stand. And it’s not as if we are looking at a massive number of injuries.
For the handful of escalators in the world that routinely have a queue of people waiting to board the escalator, sure, put up signs telling people to stand. And it’s probably cheaper to hire an employee to nag people about that rule than it is to increase the escalator/stair/elevator capacity (which would be the better solution.) But for the rest of the escalators in the world, the “stand right/walk left” rule is better. And that’s almost certainly WHY it’s the most common escalator rule.
Nonsense. WMATA offloads onto jam-packed platforms every day (well, pre-'rona). The bottleneck here is spacing between trains in tunnels, not escalator throughput. No way in hell is anyone running trains at “at 2 or 3 a minute”; it takes longer than that to stop and start.
I did some of my own timings on the escalator here at work. I found it moves at the speed that I go at when I walk up/down the stairs, so I get to the top/bottom in double time, since I walk on the escalators. That said, if people jam me up I get up or down no worse than if I took the stairs. Still, it pisses me off when people stand in the middle. It’s as bad as when idiots would walk abreast at my old gym’s running track. Especially wince we had signs everywher saying “Walkers keep right at all times”.
I rarely see elevators and escalators next to each other, but when that happens, if no one is on either, I take the escalator and walk up it, otherwise if the stairs are free, I walk up the stairs because I can actually walk up the stairs faster than taking the escalator and standing in all cases where there are actually stairs. Those huge climbs on the Metro and Tube, I’d get tired on, but they don’t have the stairs option.
I don’t get pissed off when I can see that I’m going to be blocked. I only get pissed when it looks like I have a free path only to have someone move into my way.
Yes, but everyone can’t walk. You’ve got handicapped people, elderly people, people with small children so you’ve got to have a lane for standees so on a typical two wide escalator only half the elevator can be utilized for that speed increase. If you’re going to assume that only fit and alert people are using your escalator you could just crank the speed up by 100% and you’d increase the capacity a lot more. At least until the carnage started.
Definitely endorse this idea! The vertical leap you could take at the end of an up escalator would be epic.
For really long escalators, you could have parallel tracks, faster and faster, and move from one to the next faster one, faster and faster, and then start moving back as you get close to the top. What could possibly go wrong?
Isaac Asimov envisioned such a system of slidewalks and escalators as a means of mass transit. 5 MPH increments all the way up to 60mph.
It always seems like a great idea, until you think about what could go wrong, and how horribly it could go wrong.
I remember reading a short story about a society that has that, and the guild that maintains them goes on strike or sabotages them or something, sending people flying.
But how often would you have to do that, really? Most underground are only fully crushed at peak commuting times, and the commuters know how to behave.
Really, I don’t see a problem with the existing system.
NM, 502 dupe
The same slow walkers buggering up the escalator are also slowing down he loading process on a subway car.
My wife is really disgusted with me because whenever we’re on an up elevator alone I try to time the stop and jump as high as I can, hoping to leap just before the elevator decelerates. I’ll do the same on a down elevator only jumping just before it starts down.