Escalators back after long hiatus

The escalators on the east entrance of the Tenleytown station have reopened after being out of service for 6 months. The escalators were scheduled to re-open on January 10, 2005 after an estimated five months of repairs, but were not open until last week. District and state mandated inspections often cause the opening delays, said Metro spokesperson Steve Taubenkibel. "A complete overhaul of the system usually takes 4-5 months," said Taubenkibel, "This was the case with Cleveland Park and Tenleytown, which are currently under rehabilitation programs." To many AU students, the re-opening of the Tenleytown escalators was welcome news. "It's definitely an inconvenience-especially when there are a series of escalators in a row," said SOC freshman Paula Chrin. She travels by Metro an average of six times a week. "It slows down travel time a lot, even just walking down the stairs...sometimes I use the elevators because it's faster," she said. Broken escalators have become more common in the Metro system, and cause a variety of problems. One outage in a heavy traffic area can cause long queues, bottlenecks, and delays. "The Metrorail system is heavily dependent on escalators to function smoothly," Taubenkibel said. There are 86 Metrorail stations, with a total of over 550 escalators operating at any given time, according to the WMATA website. As of February 17, 32 of these were out of service. According to Taubenkibel, most of the damage done to the escalators comes as a result of the daily pounding the stairs take from an average of 600,000-700,000 pairs of feet. "A lot of the trouble comes from people in a hurry who run up and down and jump the last few stairs," said Taubenkibel. He said the average lifespan of an escalator ranges from 10-20 years, depending on traffic and use. Another source of malfunction comes from sensitive safety devices being triggered by bumps or jolts to the stair surface. The devices stop the escalator belt from moving and have to be manually re-set before they can be mobile again. A safety switch or a tune-up only takes a few days to fix. More involved repairs, such as the replacement of an entire escalator system, require months of work. Many AU students didn't mind climbing the stairs while the Tenleytown elevators were out of service, but were annoyed with the outage for other reasons. "For me it's more of a safety hazard issue," said SPA sophomore Caroline Barrett. "Climbing up the stairs when it's raining is dangerous because they're slippery and people can fall down," she said. "What I don't understand is how they can have both escalators under construction for such a long period of time," said SIS freshman Elyse Franko. "It's not really an inconvenience for me, it's just weird it takes them so long to fix it, but I can see how it would be a burden to older people," Franko said. Taubenkibel said the Tenleytown escalators should remain operable for now. They will soon be restoring the West escalators at the Tenleytown station.