Tokyo Wants People to Stand on Both Sides of the Escalator
citylab.com
citylab.com
Standing on the right, walking on the left is a form of "rush discrimination".
If you just look at throughput, you're measuring the wrong thing. Try to measure how people feel! The fact Londoners would flip experimenters the bird when asked to stand on the left, should tell you what you need to know.
Of course, my perspective crucially ignores one category: people in a rush, who can't climb an escalator. They are disadvantaged by this. How many of them there are, I don't know, so perhaps I'm being incredibly tone-deaf.
Then there’s the added bonus that it may finally stop people from being jerks on the escalator—like the London commuter captured in a viral video this year telling a blind man with a guide dog to let go of the handrail so he can pass him.
Someone with a guide dog -- a clear signal of special need -- can have their need for reasonable accommodation utterly ignored. It can be worse for the many people who are less obviously impaired who lack some clear public signal.
I'm seriously handicapped. Most people cannot tell that by looking at me. I gave up my car more than a decade ago and I mostly get around by walking, so a lot of people see me as unusually able-bodied because I walk everywhere.
But I have serious trouble navigating certain situations, such as stairs. Escalators are hard for me because they are moving and I'm visually impaired and I walk with a permanent limp and I have joint issues and yadda. It's stressful for me to deal with the transition to step onto the escalator and stressful for me to deal with the transition to step off the escalator and I generally cannot cope with walking on the escalator. I stand on it.
There are lots of different types of handicaps in the world. Some people have social impairments. This often gets labeled Autism Spectrum Disorder.
I have two sons who needed a lot of social stuff explained when they were little. They didn't readily get it.
I think there is a larger learning curve for social things than is generally appreciated. I am a big believer that decent adults are made, not born.
Regardless, people like me have the additional issue that people who would never do something like that to a blind person will still do it to me, not realizing that I'm in genuine danger of being seriously hurt because of their behavior because I sometimes really struggle with seemingly small things.
Getting on and off a bus is also kind of a nerve-wracking production for me. Most other people just step on or off. I cannot do that. I routinely cling to whatever handholds are available. Yet I don't use a cane, walker or other device that would signal to other people that I'm seriously impaired. So sometimes people seem to just find me annoying, presumably not realizing this is actually difficult for me and thus puts me in real danger of falling and ending up potentially seriously injured.
i don't think we are there yet, because there is still some space, albeit with a bit of jostling, to move around in holborn. the platforms are not at full-capacity and commuters can still alight.
"It's a domestic flight? You should still leave early, you're not allowed to walk up the escalators anymore!"
What the world really needs is more stairs for those who are able, and more lifts for those who have difficulties with stairs. Or maybe multi-lane, variable speed walking escalators, but I guess those are sci-fi...
How so? I don't see how an escalator could possibly be slower than everybody standing (discounting the possibility of somebody actually walking backwards.)
> "Or maybe multi-lane, variable speed walking escalators, but I guess those are sci-fi... "
I've badly wanted to try that ever since I read Caves of Steel. It sounds terrifying but exhilarating.
To be clear, I'm not talking about some sort of "walk on the left" convention, which plainly reduces throughput. I'm talking about the "walk if you want to no matter what side you're on" convention, which seems to be far more universal.
If the escalator is packed the people on it can’t start walking because there is no space. And escalators are often packed in stations, for instance when a train arrives and a thousand passengers get off the train at the same time.
Furthermore since stepping onto an escalator necessarily involves walking up to that escalator, if the minimum distance between people walking were causing a throughput limitation that would manifest whether or not people on the escalator were walking.
You shouldn't carry bulky luggage in an escalators anyways.
I'm sensing zero-risk bias, typical for modern western societies. For me, there is absolutely no reason to stand on the escalator, unless handicapped of course.
The number of people who are otherwise healthy but refuse to walk up stairs just shocks me. I’ve never felt like walking up an escalator carried any significant risk for the able bodied...
I don’t know how to explain it except that people are shockingly lazy and just overall have really screwed up risk assessment
I've got long enough legs to comfortably ascend two stairs at once and I prefer the exercise as well as the speed of ascent and descent.
Being tired is a fair point, but that's why there was left/right side compromise.
Still not sure it should be encouraged, though.
As far as I'm aware, though, escalators are not a leading cause of death.
This is napkin math, but: Wikipedia says Japan's train ridership was 7.58 billion in 2014. Compared to 880 injuries, that's roughly a 1 in 1 million chance.
I feel like it would hold less true for a 3m or 4m escalator that most people would feel comfortable walking up.
Not quite sure what a ‘theoretical study’ means in this context though. They link to their previous reporting on the study, but the link provided there to the actual study is dead.
I only put in the disclaimer about height because while it's mentioned with the theoretical study, it's not mentioned with one of the only actual experiments, and Holborn is a 23m long escalator, which you wouldn't know unless you use Holborn. These findings wouldn't be very helpful in New York, for example, where most stations are so close to the surface that you're only traveling one or two stories.
I really dislike these types of articles that try to use stats for reasoning. They claim that between 2013 and 2014, so over 365 days, there were 1475 total accidents, 880 from being "improper"? What qualifies as an accident? And what's improper? If there are that many issues? Why not only make stairs? (They have those too). Another "study" is listed saying that in London, "reduced congestion by 30 percent" whatever that means. And another reasoning I disagree wit (one that can't be proven let's be honest) is that this will stop people from being jerks on the escalators. I'm pretty sure that this would annoy more people if they're unable to get by.
The only possibly reasoning is that for super long escalators, very few people walk, so half the capacity is being used.
I'll give JR East credit. If they think double side standing should be the way to go, trying it out for a month and seeing how it goes is a great way of handling it, instead of forcing it from now on and having too much confidence in success as is mostly the case in these social change campaigns.
One more thing, why is the url's slug pretty much completely different? What was the article about before? And by the way, in Tokyo, walkers go up the right side, standers are on the left. You can even see that in the picture at the top of the page. Pretty sure if you're writing about escalators in Tokyo you should mention that.
> As reported by Japan Times, a study by the Japan Elevator Association in Tokyo found that of the 1,475 escalator accidents in the city between 2013 and 2014, more than 880 were a result of people riding improperly (that includes walking or running on an escalator).
This is written poorly. Just because someone was walking does not mean it caused the accident. At the very least it could be only partially contributory. Also, how many percent of the time are people walking on the escalator there?
You could also flip the logic on its head in circumstances in which someone was not walking and was bumped from behind. Had they been walking, they likely would not have been bumped from behind.
They aren't wrong. The people who intend on standing and therefore avoid the left side are wrong. Standers should use both sides. Walkers should be free to walk on either side when the opportunity permits. This scheme gives you an identical throughput to everybody standing, and a greater mean speed.
It baffles me how many people automatically stop being active just because there's an escalator. Surely a better social norm is to encourage even mild activity and exercise?
Of course if you're exhausted or have luggage or are in tall heels or are holding a baby then by all means stand -- but stand to the side. Most of the time that won't be the case, so everyone walking will be a better overall optimization, and especially the fact that there are usually elevators in modern buildings as well that are better accomodating for luggage and babies and the disabled as well.
Each person gets to the top slightly slower individually, but more people get though in total.
Same thing has been happening in London. They've been trying to convince people to stand on both sides in some stations.
After RTFA, I still don't see what the explanation is supposed to be for the claimed increase in throughput.
Fun fact for readers in the Washington DC area... At 230ft (70m), the DC Metro Wheaton station escalator is thd longest escalator in the western hemisphere! [1]
[1] https://ggwash.org/view/34875/what-are-the-10-longest-metro-...
People who are really rushing can always take the stairs.
I’ve caught a long distance train with less than a minute to spare, which had I missed it, would have delayed my journey by an hour before the next train. It shouldn’t have been that close, I left with plenty of time to get to the main railway station via the Underground, but sometimes multiple subway lines have issues and you get cascading failures that leave you with no other choice but to run up escalators or miss your transport (especially if it avoids having to buy another train/plane ticket)
This experience made me surprised that Tokyo would need to implement such a system top-down; I figured their crowds would be large enough that it was happening anyway.
Looks like "better" queueing behavior may be responsible for the failure.
I now take it upon myself to be the first person” sometimes. If I see a long line forming to stand, and no one is walking at all, I will stand in the “walking” lane.
After that I see a lot of people with relief on their faces when they stand behind me.
I guess it also helps that I’m bald, Asian guy with a long beard. so maybe they think I’m a bum. Otherwise there were times I’ve seen people admonish the standers.
Few general remarks:
1. If people have lots of luggage or aren't comfortable using the escalator, they can take the elevator (and they do).
2. Saying that standing would prevent accidents is like saying banning cars would prevent accidents - not a particularly helpful observation. Humans are only willing to minimize risk up to a point.
3. The more complicated argument in the article is that standing would increase capacity. I don't know - I avoid rush hour, but the escalators seem empty enough so that I can walk up/down unobstructed. It's hard for me to see how I'm negatively affecting capacity. In cases where the escalator is packed, I'll stand rather than being pushy, but that never happens during the week.
In London this is less true, but I admit to still walking up.
Here's a heuristic you should try applying: under some reasonable assumptions, getting to the platform X seconds earlier should shave X seconds off your commute in expectation and not affect the variance. (Those assumptions are basically "you're not trying to catch a particular train.")
Of course, you may have a nonlinear objective function in terms of time/delay, or you may be optimising for regret instead of arrival time, and in those cases the analysis may turn out differently.
Naturally, everyone's worked out that heuristic while waiting for the college bus. It's the problem that's changed.
It’s not an issue specific to stand-only escalators, just exacerbated by it. With half the escalator reserved for walking, this issue should happen less.
Incidentally in these same overcrowded stations it’s not uncommon for the escalator to be turned off intentionally to prevent such problems. So both sides have to walk!
Just spend some time in Belgium. We are unable to form orderly queues. Elevators are like moving grapes of humans, lines in fast food are flocks of people going back and forth between the end of the line, the cash register and the spot for food delivery and people are piling on top of each other at bus stops.
It drives me mad.
We are HUMANS, we are all similar and all different, we can't be considered as "packet on a network". These kind of homogenization it typical of modern society, mostly derived from Ford model and it's harmful and dangerous for our freedom and our social evolution.
BTW not anybody walk to going from A to B in a certain amount of time, we do not exists as a work-machine, we exists as human being that work to live, not the contrary.
If the next train is in 20 minutes and the train is leaving in the next minute, walking down the escalator to make this train just saved me 20 minutes.
you could also have fewer injuries hy getting everyone (except those who can't) to walk, which would also result in a lower overall difference in attentiveness.
we don't need more silly regulations like this when things like distracted driving and air pollution are real problems that kill thousands of people.