When you get on an elevator, the 1st step and the one in front of it are basically flat. But immediately after you get on, the step in front of you starts to rise. (I’m sure all of you know how an elevator works). But I notice that the step doesn’t go straight up. Instead it juts out like a trapezoid. Finally, when you’re at the top it closes in the same fashion.
I can’t figure out why they’re designed this way. For one thing, it seems that people’s feet have a better chance of getting caught this way. I think that it would be safer if the step went straight up and then came straight down or even if it closed like a trapezoid in the opposite direction.
Any ideas?
(I tried to draw the examples but it didn’t work.)
The reason they flatten out is that it is immensely safer to have a flat plane dissapearing into the hole at the top then it would be to have a series of steps disappearing intact into a hole; think about it - if you didn’t step off in time, the rising step would snag and sever your foot as it entered the aperture - this is even more noticeable on downward moving flights.
It would be almost exactly like a very large meat grinding machine.
There’s an excellent explanation of the mechanism here; you can see why the risers have to be angled - it’s all to do with the way that they interlock and that as they start to climb, their horizontal spacing decreases.
Next question: why do up to 1/3 of the pedestrians who are walking on the left (as opposed to standing to the right) suddenly STOP when they are about 5 feet from where the escalator stops? Does it not occur to them that if they stop, everyone behind them has to stop and on short notice the whole left lane is brought to a halt? Do they not read the signs that advise even those “standing to right” to step off, not ride off, the escalator?
