Escalator Headline

[mattlistener]

"MBTA To Discontinue All Escalator Service"

Just kidding. But it certainly seems that's the direction we're headed, doesn't it?

The T is in a steady state in which escalators break down with a certain frequency, and are put back into service by a certain average # of labor hours per escalator. These two forces converge toward a saddle point. If there were millions of escalators in operation, even a 1% per week per escalator chance of breaking down would put them out of service way faster than MBTA's crew of repairfolk could get them back up and running. If there were only dozens in operation, at 1% breakdown per week the same crew could easily keep all of them running and be sitting around ready to fix more.

So, a certain size crew can keep a certain size fleet of escalators running. The number of escalators in operation will go up or down until it reaches a balance point where escalators are breaking at exactly the rate that the current crew of repairfolk fixes them. This level could be 50% of all MBTA escalators or 99% -- it all depends on the number of labor hours the MBTA is willing to pay for.

Lately we've been seeing more escalators broken at a time, some of them seemingly indefinitely. So either the base rate of escalator outage has gone up, or the average time-to-fix has gone up, or the number of labor hours the MBTA is paying for has gone down, or some combination. The result is that the MBTA is currently settling for something like 70-80% operational status in its fleet of escalators, as opposed to the high 90's.

Effectively this means that 20-30% of the deployed escalators have been demoted to permanent stairs. Which part of the system these stairs reside in may change as the steady state of breakdown/repair shuffles them around, but the social cost is similar wherever they are.

The City of Boston should require the MBTA to have a policy that 100% of its escalators should be *escalators* rather than stairs, and pay for enough labor to keep operational the number of escalators that we have in the system.

Comments

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

I don't buy that escalators are only meant to move a trickle of people. They're designed to move a lot of people all day, every day. That's what they're used for, that's what they do. Most of the MBTA escalators are well indoors, too.