Why does it take so long to mend an escalator? (2002)
lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Vaughan
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...
We're taught to value the entire lifecycle of our work, at least in my field. For example, rushing to finish a steering maintenance on a large tanker truck could mean your friend gets his thumbs crushed under a pry bar, or it could mean hundreds of fatalities as the poor job you did caused the tanker to collide with a shopping center.
A missing cotter pin or a failed motor ground could easily injure dozens, or even kill them, on a large enough escalator.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. The vast majority of the time mechanical failure results in the vehicle coming to a stop on the shoulder without anything spectacular happening. Think about all the trailer blowouts where the only damage was to the underwear of whoever was nearby. We do things (like install cotter pins, on steering, not in tires, or not intentionally at least) to prevent those sorts of failures because there's a small chance of something spectacularly bad happening (and because downtime is $$ and if you're broken down on the side of the road the DOT vultures will turn up out of nowhere and find a reason to make your downtime even more $$).
https://psychonline.eku.edu/insidelook/%E2%80%9Cit-won%E2%80...
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-B...
1. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/A-breakdown-of-B...
https://tfl.gov.uk/campaign/tube-improvements/behind-the-sce...
That stop has an outdoors elevator, and somebody was wiping shit all over the keypad daily. So reality is even more vile than any urban legend.
Just fining them, when they ain't got a whole lot of alternatives, sounds like a rather mean, and inefficient, thing to do. They probably can't pay the fine anyway, but they still gonna have the very same bodily urges. So that whole exercise would only have generated some useless bureaucracy, without actually having changed anything about the problem.
A much smarter solution would be to offer homeless people an actual place to do their business, instead of trying to "police away" fundamental societal problems like poverty and homelessness.
Like, public defecation is such a problem there, it must be tracked.
an escalator could have a steam/preasure-washing section that the stairs loop through as a part of the system. it could even work when the escalator is in use.
a publi toilet could have a round seat cover that also spins into the same type of washer in the wall.
an elevator could dock at the bottom level and couple to a drain and water/steam pour in from the top.
the city could provide more restrooms.
clearly these issues can be designed around.
But I shouldn’t really have to count them.
Convention Center, Westlake, University, Pioneer Square, International District.
I guess now that they'd have the escalator maintenence issues with steroids.
Imagine an old person or someone with movement issues not quite making the transition between the slower and high-speed bands. They’d end up as sort of human bowling ball, knocking down other passengers like skittles.
Similar thing happened to me on a crowded escalator at London Bridge tube station. Was about half way up when an old guy in front toppled back onto me. Thankfully I’d noticed he looked unsteady and managed to catch him under his armpits, otherwise we’d all have ended up in a heap at the bottom.
I didn’t have the leverage to get him upright, so we stayed with me holding him until we reached the top. His shoes hit the metal plate at the end and I flipped him to his feet.
We then gave each other a nod and went about our business.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_walkway#Trottoir_roulan...
Although, if we're making arguments about accessibility, I'm sure a more prosaic solution could be found that was no less accessible than just walking normally. But in any case, the usual approach is to have a scalable system for the 99% case, and then to provide an alternative that doesn't scale for the 1% who can't use the scalable solution - chairlifts etc.
Much like an escalator, really. People with mobility issues can't use them. Many people are afraid of them. They're hard to use safely with children and/or a pram.
I'm all for stairs for everyone who is able, and lifts for everyone who isn't.
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.
it's kind of like a people mover, but has the ability to actually stop, thanks to the split/merge at the stops.
Thirty years ago lots of people were talking about mass transit systems with small individual capsules. According to one of my engineering lecturers at the time, a limitation was that there simply isn't enough room on the ground to have all those capsules loading and unloading people in a CBD with lots of skyscrapers.
I have no doubt your lecturer is far more informed than i will ever be. I will assert that it's not really 1990 any more, and far more employers would be willing for employees to show up and leave at different times. Car congestion alone has made a lot of employers willing to have start time anywhere from 7 to 10. Which might alleviate some of that burden.
I also think, being able to take the whole trip without stopping - even if you occasionally have to go slower in high congestion areas - is much faster overall for each passenger. Which, in my humble opinion is a huge feature.
If the cars are reversible, you can also have Y junctions and stack up loads of cars perpendicular to the main rail, and fill those cars like a normal train.
here's the general idea from a video game https://i.imgur.com/7gNHkNP.jpg
ideally multiple cars could pull out of the main track for loading and unloading(in which case you might have to wait a bit for the car in front).
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.
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.
How slow is it going to accommodate every single person's movement capacity? How small is the gradient between each belt to allow them to move between belts? How wide does this whole thing end up needing to be?
Why not? Don't they use moving floors on airports already? (Also, do toddlers walk alone on the busy streets?)
Here's a design I just sketched in Factorio for a belt system with 3 speed levels, and an entry/exit for moving onto the belt system, and then between speed levels.
(For those who don't know Factorio - the blue belts are the fastest, the yellow ones are the slowest.)
Yes, but they also have non-moving floors, and they also have -- in the US, at least -- a small fleet of carts, driven by airport staff, that can carry people who have difficulty walking.
Any moving-walkway mass-transit system would have to include accessible alternatives.
Add that to the "Places I don't want to be during a system failure."
Being underground won't protect you from the noise of the mechanisms, but neither do the walls and roof of a train. Being on a train is loud.
Large crowds will cause heat within the system that will likely need to be managed, but -- like the noise -- this is equally true of trains.
How are any of those things an advantage of trains over a system of underground walkways?
But okay, let's imagine out underground walkway. Since it's underground, you can't walk on and off where you want; you only walk off where there's way up to the ground. This eliminates much of the allure of the system. Now you want to plan ahead and be ready to get off when you're next to the exit. If you missed your exit, you have to move to the next exit, or maybe cross the tunnel and go to the band of the opposite direction, and walk back a bit.
Please notice how the low-speed bands then need to run the whole length of the tunnel, adding little to the carrying capacity: few people want to travel at the speed of walking when traveling at the speed of a train is a few meters across.
If we let only the faster band(s) through the length of the tunnel, and limit the slower bands to the exit areas (pretty long and wide), we'll face the problem of walls: our band is moving fast, and nothing separates it from the walls. So we sort of need inner walls on the band. But they need doors to allow people in and out in the exit areas. And the doors need to be shut when the band is in the tunnel. It starts to look like a... train? Only an endless train with a peculiar way of boarding.
This endless train also has a downside: if anything goes wrong, the whole band/train has to stop, it cannot be re-routed. What if we segment the band into individually routable parts? Only then they'll have to stop at exit areas to allow safe getting on / off them.
Well, we have reinvented the subway.
More recent trains can be quite protected from mechanism noises. The line I'm taking more often has received brand-new trains and I usually don't hear the noise.
In much of Europe that makes trains quiet, except metro trains with tight curve.
People excluded, I think non -metro trains are usually quieter than cars.
I've only used one train in the US, which ran on jointed (not welded) track so made the 'clickety clack' noise, but presumably that varies and the North East is better.
https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2009/05/21/paris-experim...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviamotornaya_(Kalininsko%E2%8...
This isn't a broken web application sir, it's a static web page that displays important exception information.
No it’s not, it up and running. See that error page?
https://youtu.be/fLUppwRShpE?t=11
(Aside: I was about 10 minutes walk away from the location when this happened.)
Warning, very disturbing, shows someone dying.