This is a great example of a useless statistic. There's no point in having it, it does nothing at best and misleads at worst.
In order for it to be useful, at the very least it should be deaths per some value that represents the relative frequency by which elevators and escalators are used. Elevators and escalators are pretty much never covered in snow or ice and it's a lot harder to fall down an escalator since you don't need to move while on it. I'm sure if you replaced every small flight of stairs in front of a building with an escalator a lot more people would die on escalators.
>Some of the outlying entries in the data set are indeed legitimate. The Barclays Center, home to the Brooklyn Nets and New York Islanders, has not one but two freight elevators that each have a capacity of 80,000 pounds (13 or so elephants).
The citation on this (http://www.meielevatorsolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/...) was a far more interesting read than the author waxing poetic about boxes that go up and down so I guess that makes up for the abuse of statistics.