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Comment by horsecaptin | Hacker News Reader

Well, that depends. Is the escalator located at the Embarcadero BART Station in San Francisco? Are there people shitting on the escalator? Are the escalators designed to take such an abuse? Would you like the maintenance team to do something else or just fix the same escalator each week?

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The idea that hobo feces are responsible for BART's escalator problems is really an urban legend. It's the design of the damned thing, combined with statutorily mandated low-bid contracting that keeps them broken. At BART's brand-new Warm Springs station the escalators are all under roofs and there are no homeless people anywhere, and the escalators (which I must again stress are completely new) are constantly out of service. This is despite the fact that nobody uses this station, which sees less than one tenth the passenger traffic as does Embarcadero.

“When work crews pulled open a broken BART escalator at San Francisco's Civic Center Station last month, they found so much human excrement in its works they had to call a hazardous-materials team.“ (July, 2012) https://m.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Human-waste-shuts-down-...

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...

I'm not denying the fact that the homeless crap on the BART stations. What I'm saying, and what the data from the new stations proves, is that it's not a factor and neither is age, nor exposure to rain. The new ones in the middle of nowhere with no rain are still unreliable, and there's no significant difference in available between the paid area and street escalators which you would expect to be different if transient excrement was the cause.

The article [1] seems to provide data that disagrees, that the affected escalators have higher failure rates. What do you think is the motivation for these experts providing incorrect information?

1. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/A-breakdown-of-B...

That analysis commits a variety of errors. For example, they rank Warm Springs as the most reliable with “only” 5 days of downtime in the last two years. Unfortunately at that time the station had only been open for 60 days.

For comparison, on London Underground the escalators are refurbished every 20 years, and replaced every 40 years.

https://tfl.gov.uk/campaign/tube-improvements/behind-the-sce...

A hazmat team of 6 in bunny suits arrived each morning for the Hamilton VTA light rail stop in San Jose when I lived there.

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.

At what point do you just station an officer nearby, lying in wait, that will arrest that person on the spot? There has to be some criminal law against this. And as there is not an infinite supply of shit-smearing persons, it would stop soon.

Why assume people are just shit-smearing for "shit and giggles"? As far as I understand it, it's mostly homeless people who end up "doing their business there", due to a lack of better options.

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 if there were a public restroom near that area. It's at a subway terminal, I'm sure other people have "needs" as well. And if a homeless person needs to take a private crap, well, all the better.

The problem with "public restrooms" that have been tried in california is that they just turn into heroin dens and places for prostitutes to do their business. It's a difficult problem that has seen the occasional actual attempt at a solution

"Why would someone shit on an escalator?" seems absurd enough to be the setup for a joke or a Zen koan, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Why would someone shit on an escalator?

BART stations close shortly after midnight, and they are closed by locking gates at the bottom of the stairs and escalators. This means the bottom of the escalator is relatively private, and if you shit on the escalator itself the shit "disappears" when the escalator is turned on.

Ladies and gentlemen, the most expensive real estate market in the Western hemisphere!

Isn't San Francisco the city that has the map of where there are "defecation hot spots" or shit sightings or something like that?

Like, public defecation is such a problem there, it must be tracked.

In a word: drugs.

Expand this comment to pretty much any SF downtown station, frequently, and any other station in the network, less frequently.

ive always thought it would be good to make public items with a built-cleaning loop.

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.

Of the Seattle bus tunnel escalators, I can count on one hand the number that permanently smell like day old piss...

But I shouldn’t really have to count them.

But there are only five bus tunnel stops...

Convention Center, Westlake, University, Pioneer Square, International District.

Technically, he's not lying. He should be able to count them on one hand then.

Each of those has 4 to 6 escalators and the main one has around a dozen.

There are in fact self-cleaning public toilets that ranges from "just" washing the seat, bowl and floor to full pressure washing of the entire interior.

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