BART has escalating walk-stand conflict
Foot-traffic ‘rule’ leads to uneven wear, says transit system
Almost everybody who rides BART knows it, and those who don’t — the unsuspecting tourists, the occasional or self-absorbed commuters — quickly find out.
When on BART escalators, stand to the right, walk to the left. And woe unto those who get in the way.
“Those people generally get yelled at,” said Chris McMullen, a 35-year-old marketing director who commutes to San Francisco from Berkeley. “That’s how you learn the rules.”
Now BART, with anecdotal evidence from China, suggests the practice may not be healthy for the system’s escalators.
The message emerged after BART’s newest director, Bevan Dufty of San Francisco, tweeted last week about the possibility of posting signs, or painting footprints or directions telling escalator riders where to stand and where to walk.
BART tweeted back that unevenly distributed weight speeds the deterioration of the mechanical staircases. BART officials said they’ve known that all along, but cited a Wall Street Journal story from days earlier that said Chinese subways are questioning the practice of walkers on one side and people who stand on the other. The story said that in one of China’s systems, 95 percent of the escalators had suffered wear and tear because of the uneven weight distributions.
Some BART riders responded to BART’s explanatory tweets with the anger and snark that have become a hallmark of Twitter discourse, accusing the system of blaming the stand-walk custom for its decades of escalator breakdowns.
“@sfbart @bevandufty
“We are not, in any way, blaming our passengers or asking that they don’t walk on escalators.” Alicia Trost, BART spokeswoman, who says weather, debris and vandalism are the leading causes of the mechanical staircases breaking down
Like your escalators you are full of crap BART,” tweeted Cody Fitzgerald, referring to the transit agency’s problems with homeless people using downtown San Francisco escalators for restrooms.
Dufty, a former San Francisco supervisor and homelessness czar, is accustomed to controversy. But he was a bit surprised by the backlash from BART riders.
“My Twitter feed has been explosive,” he said. “It’s like I had a fire hose pointed at me: ‘This is a conspiracy,’ ‘Don’t believe it,’ ‘It’s a lie.’ ”
Others jumped to the conclusion that BART was preparing to ban walking on escalators.
Not so, said BART spokeswoman Alicia Trost, who added that the idea was never considered anywhere other than on social media.
“We are not, in any way, blaming our passengers or asking that they don’t walk on escalators,” she said.
The leading causes of escalator breakdowns, she said, are not the uneven loads but weather, debris — including human waste — and vandalism. With a history of mechanical troubles with its escalators, BART is getting ready to replace about 20 of them, a dozen to be paid for with the $3.5 billion bond measure voters approved in November.
Also coming soon are canopies over Market Street station entrances. They’re designed to protect the new escalators from the elements and prevent people from using them as bedrooms and bathrooms after BART has closed for the night.
BART riders, interviewed after they poured off the elevators at Powell Street Station Wednesday evening, said making escalator riders stand still would never work.
“People like their freedom to go,” said Diana Hilton, 59, a kindergarten teacher from Oakland. “It’s an individual thing. They don’t like to be confined.”
Akshat Srivastava, a design intern who lives in Fremont, said the informal system of clearing the way for walkers doesn’t create any problems behaviorally. He predicted that ending it would.
“I cannot imagine that causing anything but chaos,” he said.