Despite continued station closures, single-tracking and maintenance, the fact is that Metro's leadership continues to fail customers. At Friendship Heights Metro just the other day, all up escalators were stopped. A customer was surrounded by a small crowd midway up the escalator, in obvious physical distress, and unable to continue the climb. "You're going to be okay," a companion assured the victim.
This level of service is completely unacceptable, and potentially deadly for customers. It's high time that the Washington Post and regional politicians stop enabling Metro's failed leadership. Funding increases from state and local governments must be tied not only to actionable changes in operations, but also to changes at the very top of Metro. Enough's enough.
Here's the current condition of the escalator:
And not a worker to be found.
ReplyDeleteWe had an escalator at NIH out of service for years because the parts were hard to find for such an old escalator. It was shut down for years, then ran again for a few months, and was shut down again shortly afterwards. Are we starting to run into that problem on Metro? Are we trying to do the quick cheap fix when we should be doing complete replacements?
ReplyDeleteAnother question I've always had is why do the escalators seem to run 24/7? In Germany they put photosensors on the subway escalators so that they don't waste power and runtime towards inevitable failure when no one is riding.
Did you see a huge hole on the wall in the county garage on St. Elmo? It happened Monday (yesterday)evening (around 5pm), and a female driver in a white car slammed her car into the wall. It's on the second level.
ReplyDeleteCan't blame the weather for this delay. It's safely underground. Nice and warm down there all winter.
ReplyDeleteIt's real difficult in rush hour to get up and down the stairs and the one static escalator since you have people going up AND down at the same time. So train unloads and you have a mass of people trying to go up and blocking the way for people going down.
"Another question I've always had is why do the escalators seem to run 24/7? In Germany they put photosensors on the subway escalators so that they don't waste power and runtime towards inevitable failure when no one is riding."
ReplyDeleteFrom what I've heard, WMATA is scared to turn their escalators off for fear that they won't turn back on again.
I would imagine the startable/stoppable escalator is a finely tuned piece of German engineering and ball bearings or something. It is also worth noting I've seen this done mainly on short escalators, nothing like the long ones WMATA has.
ReplyDeleteInteresting point: I've never seen workers actually working on this. Consider all the weekends that the Metro system grinds to a halt for construction, yet the escalators are barely touched for months. I see barely any progress.
ReplyDeleteIt's becoming a safety issue now with one escalator and one set of stairs for up and down foot traffic. It simply can't handle that.
@Andrew: In France too, most of the escalators have start/stop sensor.
ReplyDeleteConcerning the Metro's escalators, it is not only a problem of quality of materials, it is mainly a problem of maintenance, since Metro stopped their maintenance contract with a private company to "save money"...
Moreover, Metro Escalator department has a internal politic of picking your station. Personnal with more experience/ higher qualification pick first, taking stations with newer escalator or less reported outage, while new employees without experience are stuck with stations with multiple outage...
This crooked system has been investigated many times by unsuckdcmetro with the help of Metro employees (or former employees).
Escalators need to be change, but first of all, Metro management has to go...
Not having dedicated up and down stair is a safety issue now. Why is WMATA dragging its feet on this?
ReplyDeleteThe Bethesda Metro platform escalator fix is actually THREE months behind schedule, not one. When construction began in December, the posted sign said completion would be February, which was changed to March. And they still have to fix the other escalator, not to mention the project to replace the three long escalators
ReplyDeleteJim
Writing this two months later and the work is STILL incomplete!
ReplyDelete