Photo by F1.2
On your latest Metro trip you may have noticed that brightly lit screen above the manager’s station touting how great Metro’s escalators are working now. More specifically, that “92 percent of Metro’s escalators are working today, the highest level in nearly 5 years.”
Well, it turns out that may not be entirely accurate, according to a new report posted on Unsuck D.C. Metro.
Lee Mendelowitz, a fourth year scientific computation Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland, has been keeping a close eye on escalator outages reported by WMATA since June, and recently crunched some numbers that revealed some interesting data about the percentage of escalator outages in Metro stations.
Gathering data published by the WMATA API, which records all of the reported escalator outages, Mendelowitz’s report on Unsuck D.C. Metro found that, since June 1, there have been: “7,255 unscheduled outages;” that “for every 17 minutes that Metrorail is open, a new escalator goes out of service;” that “215 escalators (36.6 percent) have a mean time between failures of less than seven days;” and that “38 escalators (6.5 percent) have a mean time between failures of less than thee days.”
Despite all this, the 92 percent availability rate that you see displayed in Metro stations is accurate, Mendelowitz thinks. “Given the data that I’ve seen, which is polled from Metro itself, I would say that number is accurate,” Mendelowitz told DCist. “But a big caveat is that there are some escalator outages that don’t seem to make it onto the list.”
Therein lies the problem with Metro’s data. It’s really hard to tell how many escalator outages go unreported. Over at the WMATA API, all escalator outages are recorded, whether they’re scheduled or unscheduled outages. “It works 24/7, so even when the system is closed, but if someone is inspecting an escalator at 3 a.m., say, on a Tuesday night, they still update that list,” Mendelowitz says.
However, since Mendelowitz has been tracking escalator outages—since March when he created the @MetroEscalators Twitter feed — he’s found numerous cases where escalator outages go unreported from the WMATA API. Mostly, he hears about these outages from people complaining on Twitter or other social media outlets, but when crosschecked with the WMATA API, they’re not recorded.
“It’s hard to know how many escalators that go out don’t go on the list,” Mendelowitz says. But he does find it suspicious that escalators are going unreported on the API, given how supposedly thorough the list is supposed to be.”I have no evidence that they’re intentionally not [reporting] it,” Mendelowitz says. “But I will say that I do find it strange that sometimes escalator outages never make it onto the list, because that’s what it’s for.” This may be chalked up to protocol not being follow, Mendelowitz believes.
DCist reached out to Metro for a request for comment and spokesman Dan Stessel wrote back saying “I have a standing rule of not commenting on Unsuck.”
Another disconcerting thing, according to Unsuck D.C. Metro, is the frequency of which certain escalators are reportedly out of service, specifically that the escalators at the Dupont Circle South entrance and at Foggy Bottom are two of the lowest performing escalators. The escalators at the Foggy Bottom were replaced in 2011, and just last year, the Dupont Circle South station was closed for nearly eight months to completely replace all of the escalators.
In Mendelowitz’s report, all three escalators at the Dupont Circle South station “ranked, on average, 387th in availability among Metro’s 588 escalators,” whereas the three at Foggy Bottom “rank a collective 471 out of 588.”
Mendelowitz doesn’t have any theories as to why those two stations’ escalators are among the worst performing, but says it’s definitely something Metro needs to figure out. “I think it’s important for them to address that, because it is concerning,” Mendelowitz said. WMATA declined to comment further on the data concerning the Dupont Circle South and Foggy Bottom station escalators.
Still, despite the murky data surrounding the “92 percent” number Metro is reporting, Mendelowitz doesn’t think it’s completely inaccurate: “Truth be told, I don’t think it’s too far off.
