Stop Walking on the Escalator
Escalator walkers and escalator racks are forever locked in a fight – they are like toilet paper roll installers and installers from the inside, or GIF announcers, or single and double struts that are only brought down face to face every day in shopping malls, airports, offices, at train exits and on the various moving staircases of the world. And the real evidence seems to be on the side of observers. Walkers are a bottleneck, and they slow each other down – and the stand-up ones -.
In a 2015 London Underground experiment, London transport authorities instructed passengers to stand on either side of the elevator escalator instead of on the left. They found that with this switch, the escalator could receive an extra passenger every two seconds. That’s 28 percent more passengers who could climb the escalator in a given period of time if everyone stopped trying to walk.
The reason is that when people climb the escalator, they need more space in front of and behind them. Consider how close cars can get on a slow city street compared to how much space they need on the highway. It turns out that the sheer amount of space escalators take away from all the time they get from walking. They put in more effort and get worse results.
Even worse, on a very long escalator, most casual riders know not to walk. So they politely gather on the crowded right side of the escalator. As Quartz notes , everyone leaves half of the escalator empty in case someone decides to climb it. We treat bystanders like kings. Why? Because we were taught to worship workaholics, strong drivers, people who can’t stand still for thirty seconds and catch their breath. We all waste half of the escalator space slowing down. It’s humiliating. Let’s put an end to this.
If you are ready to become a hero, but an outcast – Batman – then the next time you find yourself on a crowded escalator, go to the “pedestrian” side and stop . Let everyone gather behind you. Let them fill the escalator on both sides, nice and tight. They won’t know it, but you actually speed them up.
This rule only applies if there are many people on the escalator. If you are alone, of course, you will climb faster if you go on foot. It’s only when people interact – when your walking forces you to leave space for each other – that the system slows down.
In such cases, I say, stop anyway. Sounds silly, right? Waste a few seconds for no reason? Yes, I used to walk the escalator. I felt the same way. I read this tweet one day.
A banal tweet, a formulaic comment , but I couldn’t get rid of it. Every time I walked up the escalator, I was filled with fear, as if the hypnotist had pulled the trigger at me. Walking up the escalator is bad . This is not the same as climbing a regular staircase. This is disorienting, for example, poorly synchronized virtual reality or too many games with the phone in the car. It tires you. It forces you to face more strangers than necessary. It hardly saves you time. This is a signal of virtue.
So I stopped. This is good. I check the texts, stare blankly around, gasp for breath, I stare at the back of the person in front of me. This is not a moment of meditation or anything like that, it is one moment less, as much as possible, the grinding of the revolving wheel of life.
And when I go downstairs, I go up the stairs.