Photo by @MeisnereCMP

Metro made its riders very excited in October when a set of three new escalators opened at the south entrance to the Dupont Circle station. Fewer, customers were told, would be the days of constant power failures and having to trudge up and down supposedly moving staircases that went immobile.

But, it turns out the new boss seems the same as the old boss. The Washington Examiner reports that in the 40 days since the new escalators came online, they’ve gone down 20 times:

Since then, they have experienced multiple shutdowns of varying lengths. One outage occurred on Oct. 25 at the same time Metro’s board was lauding the success of the project. Another occurred on Oct. 30, knocking two of the three new escalators out of service, records show, and leaving riders to walk up a single 188-foot stalled staircase. Metro said one double outage lasted only a few minutes but could not say whether it was the Oct. 30 outage.

The October 25 outage occurred after the station’s fire alarm went off by mistake, triggering a shutdown of the escalators.

Philip Stewart, a spokesman for Metro, tells DCist in an email that all but three of the 20 outages were caused by “routine break-in adjustments” or instances which triggered the escalators’ built-in safety switches. Nine of the outages are attributable to the safety switches, often the result of oversized pieces of luggage thudding down on one of the escalators’ comb plate, Stewart says.

If anything, Metro says that the safety-switch outages are a good sign that the escalators are working. “I would also add that a safety switch activation is not indicative of anything wrong with the escalators—in fact, that is the escalator doing what it is supposed to do,” Stewart writes.