Thursday, June 3, 2010

Escalator Consultants Give Up, Bring Own Ladders

The escalator consultants combing the Metro system in a search for what is causing the intractable problems have apparently given up and are bringing their own ladders in order to circumvent the mobs that gather at the bottom of many of the shorter, out of service escalators.

Rumor has it their first advice to Metro will be to allow passengers paying peak of the peak fares to bring their own as well.

We knew there had to be a perk to go along with those higher fares! Thanks!

Related:
Escalator improvement: No we can't
System bottlenecks
Escalators-to-stairs idea shot down in flames
What is wrong with the escalators?
Escalator forecast: Heavy sucking with intermittent unsucking
Metro's failin'est escalator

Thanks to "gmail" for the pic.

12 comments:

saber_saw25 said...

Who wears black socks and sandals? Good Lord!

Anonymous said...

Next will be rappelling ropes for the long ones!

Kara said...

Maybe they will suggest such brilliant strategies as what I ran into yesterday? If an escalator is broken after the 'will return to service by ...' date they fix the sign and not the escalator?

Anonymous said...

"Who wears black socks and sandals?"

That guy. Should be pretty clear.

Anonymous said...

Metro could have saved money by replacing them with stairs but nope.

Yeah ok.

Anonymous said...

Commenting on footwear? I'm going to go ahead and assume saber_saw25 is a UVA grad.

dan thorne said...

Shocking dress sense. Can we mock him into submission? What a tool that guy is. Total loser.

Anonymous said...

Stairs aren't entirely practical in our system. Most of the station to street escalators are too long, and most of the platform to exit rises are both too long and too steep.

Anonymous said...

@Anonymous 11:06

While I would agree that in many cases, the distance from platform to exit is too great for stairs to be a reasonable option, there are plenty of places where the stair option would be perfectly practical instead of the escalators -- whose risers are indeed to steep/wide for use as stairs. But apparently metro's solution to many problems is to simply throw money at the problem.

saber_saw25 said...

I am not a UVA grad!

Anonymous said...

The black-socks-with-sandals guy may just be European. That look is very popular among Germans, for example. Which is not to disagree with saber_saw25 and dan_thorne that the look is bad - Germans are not known as being particularly fashionable.

Kara said...

Maybe those consultants can look at the fact that metro had *all 3* of the dupont circle south exit street level escalators not working this morning? Also that only one escalator for the whole station (which may have been at the other exit) was listed on the wmata site as being down?

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