18 ms·

Why does it take so long to mend an escalator? (2002)

66 points by danso 8y ago

randlet 8y ago
"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."
- toast_coder 8y ago
  Yeah that's some fun logic. This isn't a broken web application sir, it's a static web page that displays important exception information.
  - Swenrekcah 8y ago
    Give me a static page with the information I want anyday please
    - scarejunba 8y ago
      Sure. Whenever you feel the need for one of those, click this link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17702940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17702940
      - scarejunba 8y ago
        500 Internal Server Error
  - bluedino 8y ago
    “The web server is down” No it’s not, it up and running. See that error page?
- DenisM 8y ago
  [...] 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%80%93Solntsevskaya_line) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviamotornaya_(Kalininsko%E2%8...
  - freewilly1040 8y ago
    It's a Mitch Hedberg joke
    - hinkley 8y ago
      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 8y ago
        He died of a drug overdose, nothing to do with escalators or stairs.
  - jpatokal 8y ago
    That accident happened when the escalator was in motion when the mechanical failure occurred, and the brakes had been incorrectly installed. If it had been stopped and brakes correctly applied, the escalator would have functioned fine as stairs.
- acheron 8y ago
  Mitch was obviously unfamiliar with WMATA.
- guardiangod 8y ago
  I know this is a joke, but it is false. https://youtu.be/fLUppwRShpE?t=11 https://youtu.be/fLUppwRShpE?t=11 (Aside: I was about 10 minutes walk away from the location when this happened.)
  - nathancahill 8y ago
    Ugh, reminds me of this recent ski lift accident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzvt0gTAXvA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzvt0gTAXvA
  - berberous 8y ago
    Even worse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2X1zEIyWUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2X1zEIyWUw Warning, very disturbing, shows someone dying.
- quickthrower2 8y ago
  As an exercise machine, it is actually broken when it is moving.
danso 8y ago
> 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.
horsecaptin 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    “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-BART-escalators-3735981.php https://m.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Human-waste-shuts-down-... 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-BART-s-broken-down-escalators-11180030.php#photo-12973647 https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/A-breakdown-of-B...
    - ebikelaw 8y ago
      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.
trukterious 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
  - TylerE 8y ago
    It's not quite as clear cut as you make it sound, imo. A belt system would run continuously, which means no waiting for the next train, and you don't have to slow down at every intermediate stop, which should improve average speeds.
    - nine_k 8y ago
      At the cost of much decreased capacity, because a lot of the system moves pretty slowly; you cannot make the bands narrower than what it takes to stand with two feet, and likely wider for some safety. Also, the amount of area and mass to move per passenger grows quite a lot, because most passengers will want to be on the fastest band, and all the gradual bands will be much less occupied. The system can work reasonably when the moving bands are very lightweight, thin layers moved by a motor without many (or any) moving parts (the way maglev moves). It also should have absurdly low friction: unlike a train, it has a lot of contact surface. To say nothing about turns. Not that it's impossible, but technology-wise we're totally not there yet to make such a thing practical.
thaumasiotes 8y ago
> 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 8y ago
  Thats how escalators are often designed, isn't it?
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    ...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.
nimbius 8y ago
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.
- ballooney 8y ago
  I can vouch for the testing and safety overhead when compared to what the layman might imagine. A friend of mine designs the ticket barriers for the London Underground, among other customers, and the work that goes into ensuring the safety of those autonatic saloon-door style gates is enormous - you can just imagine what a poorly designed or faulty one might do to, I dont know, a pregnant person. It’s definitely a case of the 80:20 rule applying to the design vs the finessing and safety.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  >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.
  - imglorp 8y ago
    I think that's the cognitive bias called the Optimism Bias. https://psychonline.eku.edu/insidelook/%E2%80%9Cit-won%E2%80%99t-happen-me%E2%80%9D-optimism-bias https://psychonline.eku.edu/insidelook/%E2%80%9Cit-won%E2%80...
JudasGoat 8y ago
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.

66 points by danso 8y ago

"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."

toast_coder 8y ago
Yeah that's some fun logic. This isn't a broken web application sir, it's a static web page that displays important exception information.
- Swenrekcah 8y ago
  Give me a static page with the information I want anyday please
  - scarejunba 8y ago
    Sure. Whenever you feel the need for one of those, click this link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17702940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17702940
    - scarejunba 8y ago
      500 Internal Server Error
- bluedino 8y ago
  “The web server is down” No it’s not, it up and running. See that error page?
DenisM 8y ago
[...] 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%80%93Solntsevskaya_line) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviamotornaya_(Kalininsko%E2%8...
- freewilly1040 8y ago
  It's a Mitch Hedberg joke
  - hinkley 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      He died of a drug overdose, nothing to do with escalators or stairs.
- jpatokal 8y ago
  That accident happened when the escalator was in motion when the mechanical failure occurred, and the brakes had been incorrectly installed. If it had been stopped and brakes correctly applied, the escalator would have functioned fine as stairs.
acheron 8y ago
Mitch was obviously unfamiliar with WMATA.
guardiangod 8y ago
I know this is a joke, but it is false. https://youtu.be/fLUppwRShpE?t=11 https://youtu.be/fLUppwRShpE?t=11 (Aside: I was about 10 minutes walk away from the location when this happened.)
- nathancahill 8y ago
  Ugh, reminds me of this recent ski lift accident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzvt0gTAXvA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzvt0gTAXvA
- berberous 8y ago
  Even worse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2X1zEIyWUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2X1zEIyWUw Warning, very disturbing, shows someone dying.
quickthrower2 8y ago
As an exercise machine, it is actually broken when it is moving.

danso 8y ago

> 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.

horsecaptin 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  “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-BART-escalators-3735981.php https://m.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Human-waste-shuts-down-... 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-BART-s-broken-down-escalators-11180030.php#photo-12973647 https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/A-breakdown-of-B...
  - ebikelaw 8y ago
    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.

trukterious 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.
- TylerE 8y ago
  It's not quite as clear cut as you make it sound, imo. A belt system would run continuously, which means no waiting for the next train, and you don't have to slow down at every intermediate stop, which should improve average speeds.
  - nine_k 8y ago
    At the cost of much decreased capacity, because a lot of the system moves pretty slowly; you cannot make the bands narrower than what it takes to stand with two feet, and likely wider for some safety. Also, the amount of area and mass to move per passenger grows quite a lot, because most passengers will want to be on the fastest band, and all the gradual bands will be much less occupied. The system can work reasonably when the moving bands are very lightweight, thin layers moved by a motor without many (or any) moving parts (the way maglev moves). It also should have absurdly low friction: unlike a train, it has a lot of contact surface. To say nothing about turns. Not that it's impossible, but technology-wise we're totally not there yet to make such a thing practical.

thaumasiotes 8y ago

> 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 8y ago
Thats how escalators are often designed, isn't it?
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  ...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.

nimbius 8y ago

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.

ballooney 8y ago
I can vouch for the testing and safety overhead when compared to what the layman might imagine. A friend of mine designs the ticket barriers for the London Underground, among other customers, and the work that goes into ensuring the safety of those autonatic saloon-door style gates is enormous - you can just imagine what a poorly designed or faulty one might do to, I dont know, a pregnant person. It’s definitely a case of the 80:20 rule applying to the design vs the finessing and safety.
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
>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.
- imglorp 8y ago
  I think that's the cognitive bias called the Optimism Bias. https://psychonline.eku.edu/insidelook/%E2%80%9Cit-won%E2%80%99t-happen-me%E2%80%9D-optimism-bias https://psychonline.eku.edu/insidelook/%E2%80%9Cit-won%E2%80...

JudasGoat 8y ago

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.