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I've never seen someone stopping the escalator, but I have seen the stairs standing still with astounding frequency. I thought it was poor maintenance, but it never occurred to me it was flow optimization.

I've seen escalators that at night stop (like go to sleep) if nobody is walking and start (wake up) when someone walks towards them.

I used to turn on the escalator on my parents' house station when I was a teenager, sometimes even with people walking on top of it. Then they added a key to turn it on :(.

PS: Acoyte station, A subway line, Buenos Aires.

If that happened to today's kids, they could just look up lock picking on Youtube and fix the problem.

The internet makes life better. Again.

They would also put a security camera. They are really cheap now. It would not be wise to pick that lock.

I thought that in the Southern Hemisphere, you had to use the Up escalator to go Down, and vice-versa.