Photo by afagen on Flickr.

An audit confirmed what most riders already knew: Metro’s escalators and elevators are not working like they should. The audit identified a number of places where maintenance processes and training could do a better job for maintainance and repair of escalators and elevators.

The audit itself hasn’t been released, but according to Assistant General Manager Dave Kubicek’s summary of the audit the major issues are an unbalanced preventative maintenance schedule, a shortage of supervisors, water intrusion, and insufficient training of workers on the Maintenance Management System (Maximo).

But let’s not jump to the conclusion that the Post’s headline writer originally did, who labeled Ann Scott Tyson’s writeup, “Report says Metro failing on escalator repairs” before changing it to the more sensible “Escalator audit highlights deficiencies.”

It’s not the scandal of the year that the escalator maintenance program isn’t perfect. In fact, riders all pretty much could tell that already. Any big organization has flaws like this. A good one tries to root out and address those flaws, and now that Richard Sarles is running WMATA (for the time being), the organization is making strides in this area.

Just identifying the problems is the first step. Now, the Board and riders need to measure whether they are being addressed and whether such steps are actually improving escalator and elevator performance.

Thanks to Metro now releasing a Vital Signs Report each month, we know that escalator availability has been hovering around 90% and elevator availability around 96%.

What level of availability should riders reasonably expect once these maintenance procedures are fixed? Are the targets set in the Vital Signs report of 93% escalator and 97.5% elevator availability the right targets, and will these changes get us to these targets?

1 out of 14 escalators out of service may be a significant shift in expectations for riders. And the target for elevator availability would actually mean Metrorail availability of 90% for riders with wheelchairs and strollers, since each trip requires 4 elevators and these riders can’t take escalators or stairs.

Once targets are agreed upon, there needs to be a clear link between these targets and the investments required to meet them. There’s lots of good ideas for improving availability, like the “team-building initiative to enhance communications among staff and improve the team’s effectiveness” that the current Vital Signs report commits to.

But we need more than good ideas. What will it take to actually reach availability targets? And how do we know?

The main proposal put forward by the audit requires increasing scheduled maintenance intervals. But maintenance requires taking escalators out of service, and Kubicek says in Vital Signs that this is the cause of some lack of availability. At what point does the downtime of increased maintenance outweigh the unscheduled downtime that this maintenance prevents? Can any of the inspections conducted during routine maintenance be done with remote sensors (detecting water, vibration, heat, etc)?

Also, as David pointed out in an interview on Fox 5 (embedded below), there’s another factor behind escalator problems: resources. The system was new in the 1970s and 1980s, and escalators and elevators needed little repair. Now they need more repair, but budgets still are underfunding ongoing maintenance like this. And at least so far, the Board has been showing an unlimited willingness to spend money on safety fixes without regard to cost, but may continue to shortchange other needs.

A smart General Manager would announce to the Board and, by extension, to the media: We’re at 90% now. We’ve found these internal issues and will fix them. These contribute to (say) 20% of downtime so that will get us to 92%. If we allocate some of our capital dollars to escalator repair, we can get to (say) 96% by addressing additional causes of 40% of downtime.

Soon, the public will be invited to comment on WMATA’s Capital Improvement Plan, a multi-year priority list of where to spend limited capital dollars. Much of that rightly ought to go to safety, but there will be a danger of putting too many eggs in that one basket. If we really want escalators to be working, which by the way has safety implications of its own, we will need to send a message to the Board to be sure to allocate some capital dollars to repairing and replacing escalators.

Ken Archer is CTO of a software firm in Tysons Corner. He commutes to Tysons by bus from his home in Georgetown, where he lives with his wife and son.  Ken completed a Masters degree in Philosophy from The Catholic University of America.

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.