
Why does it take so long to mend an escalator? (2002) - danso
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n05/peter-campbell/why-does-it-take-so-long-to-mend-an-escalator
======
danso
> _In the early days they had to be persuaded to get on at all. A one-legged
> man, ‘Bumper’ Harris, was hired to ride for a whole day on the first
> installation – it was at Earls Court – to show how easy it was. Some people
> were sceptical (how had he lost his leg?) but others broke their journey
> there just to ride up and down._

Reminds me of a Blendtec salesman I saw at Costco who had one of his arms
amputated at the elbow. The initial reaction was revulsion, especially since
he made frequent jokes about losing his arm in a blender accident as he was
using his arm stub to push things into the blender. But it was a very
effective demo in showing how the Blendtec was so easy to use that it
practically ran itself.

------
nimbius
As an automotive engine mechanic, ive always been fascinated by large building
equipment like elevators and escalators.

That having been said, most of the time when large ubiquitous equipment
requires periodic maintenance at scheduled intervals, you have more safety
involved. large multistory escalators and elevators have numerous moving parts
and circuits to lock out/tag out to ensure equipment service is performed
safely. The result of a rush-job is always a gruesome headline on the local
news.

Theres also extensive testing. Overload/overtorque systems have to be tested,
fail-safe certification has to take place, and the device has to run for a
given time before its entered back into service. In my job, I wouldnt think to
return a heavy truck to a customer before driving it on both city and highway
streets to confirm everything I've worked on performs as expected.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
>The result of a rush-job is always a gruesome headline on the local news.

The opposite. 99x/100 rushing things turns out fine. It's just a small
fraction of the time you get a near miss or an actual injury. We just happen
to live in a society where those risks aren't tolerated. Elsewhere in the
world those risks are tolerated. That's part of why so much manufacturing has
moved overseas. When you don't have to spend an hour locking out a conveyor
system to spend 10min replacing a part you can pass those savings down to your
customers and undercut the competition.

~~~
nimbius
>It's just a small fraction of the time you get a near miss or an actual
injury.

We're taught to value the entire lifecycle of our work, at least in my field.
For example, rushing to finish a steering maintenance on a large tanker truck
could mean your friend gets his thumbs crushed under a pry bar, or it could
mean hundreds of fatalities as the poor job you did caused the tanker to
collide with a shopping center.

A missing cotter pin or a failed motor ground could easily injure dozens, or
even kill them, on a large enough escalator.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
>, or it could mean hundreds of fatalities as the poor job you did caused the
tanker to collide with a shopping center.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. The vast majority of the time
mechanical failure results in the vehicle coming to a stop on the shoulder
without anything spectacular happening. Think about all the trailer blowouts
where the only damage was to the underwear of whoever was nearby. We do things
(like install cotter pins, on steering, not in tires, or not intentionally at
least) to prevent those sorts of failures because there's a small chance of
something spectacularly bad happening (and because downtime is $$ and if
you're broken down on the side of the road the DOT vultures will turn up out
of nowhere and find a reason to make your downtime even more $$).

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horsecaptin
Well, that depends. Is the escalator located at the Embarcadero BART Station
in San Francisco? Are there people shitting on the escalator? Are the
escalators designed to take such an abuse? Would you like the maintenance team
to do something else or just fix the same escalator each week?

~~~
ebikelaw
The idea that hobo feces are responsible for BART's escalator problems is
really an urban legend. It's the design of the damned thing, combined with
statutorily mandated low-bid contracting that keeps them broken. At BART's
brand-new Warm Springs station the escalators are all under roofs and there
are no homeless people anywhere, and the escalators (which I must again stress
are completely new) are constantly out of service. This is despite the fact
that nobody uses this station, which sees less than one tenth the passenger
traffic as does Embarcadero.

~~~
lloydde
“When work crews pulled open a broken BART escalator at San Francisco's Civic
Center Station last month, they found so much human excrement in its works
they had to call a hazardous-materials team.“ (July, 2012)
[https://m.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Human-waste-shuts-
down-...](https://m.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Human-waste-shuts-down-BART-
escalators-3735981.php)

On the other hand although the following article mentions human waste multiple
times, it seems likely the largest factor is age:

“The escalators had once been very reliable but are now showing their age,
Lemon said. The Dublin/Pleasanton escalator, on the job since 1997, and the
Millbrae escalator, in service since 2003, are both closing in on 20 years,
which means it’s time for an overhaul, Lemon said.“

[https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/A-breakdown-
of-B...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/A-breakdown-of-BART-s-
broken-down-escalators-11180030.php#photo-12973647)

~~~
ebikelaw
I'm not denying the fact that the homeless crap on the BART stations. What I'm
saying, and what the data from the new stations proves, is that it's not a
factor and neither is age, nor exposure to rain. The new ones in the middle of
nowhere with no rain are still unreliable, and there's no significant
difference in available between the paid area and street escalators which you
would expect to be different if transient excrement was the cause.

~~~
lloydde
The article [1] seems to provide data that disagrees, that the affected
escalators have higher failure rates. What do you think is the motivation for
these experts providing incorrect information?

1\. [https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/A-breakdown-
of-B...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/A-breakdown-of-BART-s-
broken-down-escalators-11180030.php#photo-12973647)

~~~
ebikelaw
That analysis commits a variety of errors. For example, they rank Warm Springs
as the most reliable with “only” 5 days of downtime in the last two years.
Unfortunately at that time the station had only been open for 60 days.

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trukterious
This is slightly depressing as I've been looking forward to Isaac Asimov's
"belts" for some time now. A giant loop of of parallel walkways of graded
speeds, continuously operating for city-wide underground transport.

I guess now that they'd have the escalator maintenence issues with steroids.

~~~
nine_k
While at it: trains are so much more convenient.

Walls and roof protect you from excessive heat, excessive cold, wind, rain,
snow, and the sound the mechanisms make.

Seats allow you (or people more tired than you) to sit and work, read, or
rest, especially when you ride for an hour.

Also, train infrastructure is vastly narrower than such a collection of moving
bands, and is readily available for maintenance when no trains are going.

The downside is that trains have to have stations. But the moving band will
have to have a "station" all along it.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Being underground also protects you from excessive heat, excessive cold, wind,
rain, and snow.

Being underground won't protect you from the noise of the mechanisms, but
neither do the walls and roof of a train. Being on a train is loud.

Large crowds will cause heat within the system that will likely need to be
managed, but -- like the noise -- this is equally true of trains.

How are any of those things an advantage of trains over a system of
underground walkways?

~~~
nine_k
I just happen to ride a lot of above-ground trains. E.g. much of the New York
City subway goes above ground, sometimes pretty high, in Brooklyn and Queens.
Same applies to quite a few cities (e.g. London and Moscow, off the top of my
head).

But okay, let's imagine out underground walkway. Since it's underground, you
can't walk on and off where you want; you only walk off where there's way up
to the ground. This eliminates much of the allure of the system. Now you want
to plan ahead and be ready to get off when you're next to the exit. If you
missed your exit, you have to move to the next exit, or maybe cross the tunnel
and go to the band of the opposite direction, and walk back a bit.

Please notice how the low-speed bands then need to run the whole length of the
tunnel, adding little to the carrying capacity: few people want to travel at
the speed of walking when traveling at the speed of a train is a few meters
across.

If we let only the faster band(s) through the length of the tunnel, and limit
the slower bands to the exit areas (pretty long and wide), we'll face the
problem of walls: our band is moving fast, and nothing separates it from the
walls. So we sort of need inner walls on the band. But they need doors to
allow people in and out in the exit areas. And the doors need to be shut when
the band is in the tunnel. It starts to look like a... train? Only an endless
train with a peculiar way of boarding.

This endless train also has a downside: if anything goes wrong, the whole
band/train has to stop, it cannot be re-routed. What if we segment the band
into individually routable parts? Only then they'll have to stop at exit areas
to allow safe getting on / off them.

Well, we have reinvented the subway.

~~~
thaumasiotes
What does anything in this "response" have to do with heat, cold, wind, rain,
snow, or noise?

~~~
rfrey
Why did you put the word response in quotes?

~~~
nine_k
"I just happen to ride a lot of above-ground trains" implies trains being
exposed to wind, rain, snow, cold, and heat. Same would apply directly to
passengers if the moving walk bands were above-ground.

------
JudasGoat
In their early days, escalator's were disruptive in that "elevator operators"
were eliminated. I wonder if that contributed to the reluctance to use them at
first.

------
thaumasiotes
> Stepping onto an escalator is an act of faith. From time to time you see
> people poised at the top, advised by instinct not to launch themselves onto
> the river of treads. Riding the moving stairs is an adventure for the
> toddling young and a challenge to the tottering old. Natural hesitancy puts
> a limit on throughput.

This seems right, but it's also trivial to fix -- just lengthen the ends of
the escalator so there's a flat section to get onto or off from. Nobody
hesitates to get on a moving sidewalk.

~~~
grkvlt
Thats how escalators are often designed, isn't it?

~~~
thaumasiotes
...no? In my experience, you get something like 1.5 steps of flat space before
they start rising/descending. It's not enough to be totally comfortable
getting on.

------
randlet
"An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs. You should never see
an Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order sign, just Escalator Temporarily Stairs.
Sorry for the convenience."

~~~
DenisM
[...] The escalators of the station caused a significant disaster on the
Moscow Metro on February 17, 1982, that killed at least eight people. [...]

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviamotornaya_(Kalininsko%E2%8...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviamotornaya_\(Kalininsko%E2%80%93Solntsevskaya_line\))

~~~
freewilly1040
It's a Mitch Hedberg joke

~~~
hinkley
Quoting someone who died by misadventure when the subject is public safety is
either tone deaf as hell or way more satirical than I’m prepared for on a
Monday.

~~~
mikeash
He died of a drug overdose, nothing to do with escalators or stairs.

