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ChineseThe Bus Bench Goes After Broken Escalators
The BusTard over at The Bus Bench blog deserves a MetroRider Award of Blogging Excellence for reporting on the most glaring example of Metro’s inability to hold together even the most basic elements of their rag-tag transit system. Anyone who has ever descended into or ascended out of a Red Line station knows that, more often than not, the escalators do not work. They are either not moving, blocked off, or completely ripped out as men in jump suits tweak around parts of an escalator normal citizens are never supposed to see.
The thing is, most of us, in our complacency and relative good health, just pass it off as an annoying example of bureaucratic ineptitude and continue on up the stairs. The Bus Bench isn’t having that any longer, and with its nearly daily video reports of out-of-order Metro escalators, it’s shedding a very bright light on that bureaucratic ineptitude that has long been ignored.
The results are almost humorous in the fact that in the first 15 days of the year, not a day has gone by without a broken escalator. In fact, January 15th set a record with five escalators out between Westlake/McArthur Park, 7th Street Metro Center, and Pershing Square. Those are three consecutive stations. Insane!
Discussion
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What baffles me is how they can have this problem over escalators but largely not elevators. Save for the pesky left-side elevator at Wilshire/Vermont, they work far more frequently than those of any other city I’ve lived in.
Having said that, if any guerrilla repair technicians would like to sneak into Wilshire/Vermont in the middle of the night to fix that stupid thing, I’ll gladly provide donuts and coffee. I don’t get why that one stays out and every other elevator in the system is quickly fixed.
I think that it’s reasonable to assume that many of the stopped escalators are from dorky teens hitting the emergency stop. When you exit a station and escalator after escalator is stopped I’d almost guarantee that’s what happened. I think that happens quite often.
As someone who carries a set of keys to restart Metro Rail escalators, I can tell you that Shawn is correct. I have actually seen the dorks do it (and boy are they surprised when I take out my keys and immediately restart it).
There is one other factor, which may be triggered by dorky teens or other idiots: If someone kicks the side panel near where it protects the side of the steps in just the right way, it trips a safety switch stopping the escalator. If that happens, my key will not restart it and Mitsubishi techs have to come take apart the side panels to reset the switch. (This may seem like insider information, but I am told by Mitsubishi that it is standard on all escalators and is apparently already well-known by dorks and idiots.)
And, to satisfy everyone’s curiosity, here is a partial list of people who carry escalator keys …
Sheriff’s deputies
Metro Rail supervisors and management
Private security officers at the stations
Station clean-up personnel
Roger Snoble
… and one Governance Councilmember
Punk kidz. That makes sense. Big red buttons that you are not supposed to touch will obviously get touched. Even the BusTard makes note of the restart phenomenon by a custodial personnel on Jan. 10:
Whatever the reason, it’s pathetic. I lived in Ukraine for a year, a country still struggling out of its post-soviet funk, and the escalators at the metro stations kept working there day after day, with barely a hiccup. LA doesn’t come close to comparing to the level of service.