Posts about Elevators

Finding a lift: One of the first obstacles faced by wheelchair-bound riders is finding the elevator entrance into the system. Unlike the more common escalator shafts, elevators are often unaccompanied by the distinctive M-capped pylon, and are sometimes located blocks away from the main entrance.

Additionally, most stations have an elevator at only one mezzanine, when there are multiple entrances. Dupont Circle, for example, has 2 entrances. The south entrance empties onto 19th Street south of the Circle. The North entrance ejects riders onto the corner of 20th & Q Streets. Riders needing an elevator can only use the north entrance.

At Union Station, where Deena first encountered Metro, the south entrance, at Columbus Circle (and also from the Union Station Food Court), is elevator-less. The elevator is located at the north entrance, from the Amtrak concourse and First Street.

The people Deena asked for assistance didn't know that there was no elevator from the south mezzanine. They did not know to direct her to the north entrance, and as a result, she got stranded. Metro should take steps to put signage at all non-accessible entrances directing riders to the nearest elevator. At Union Station, that might look something like this:

No Accessible Entrance:
Riders needing an elevator should use the north entrance to the station, located near First and G Streets NE or from the Amtrak concourse near the Post Office. Distance to north entrance is approximately 500 feet.

Alphabet soup: Using elevators in the system generally means encountering a mix of buttons labeled with one or two seemingly random letters. I'm pretty sure I recall a station where the platform elevator ran from T to E and the street elevator ran from M to E. In one case, the E clearly stands for exit. In the other case, the E stands for "mezzanine". T stands for train, by the way, although that's sometimes "P" for platform. And E is variously S for street.

These randomly applied letters don't benefit users of the system who are not familiar with it, especially those who don't speak English. And while many of Metro's elevators only have two stops—the one you're at and the other one—some stations present riders with a choice.

Take Fort Totten, for instance. A rider entering the station through the mezzanine gets on the elevator and sees "UL", "M", and "LL". No signs inside or outside the elevator even hint about which lines are on which level. So unless you know the Red Line is above the mezzanine, you don't know which button to press.

Metro could easily add some small labels next to the buttons to clarify which button takes you to which line.

Dead ends and serial elevators: Another issue that riders face comes up at the downtown transfer stations. Those stations were designed without elevators in mind, so they were shoehorned into the stations before construction was complete. That often means riders have to take multiple elevators to navigate the system.

Let's take L'Enfant Plaza, for example. The only elevator access to the street is from the Maryland Avenue entrance. That elevator takes riders to the north mezzanine. From there, they have a choice of elevators, one down to the Greenbelt/Fort Totten platform or one down to the Branch Avenue/Huntington platform. So far, so good. At almost all stations, riders have to use at least 2 elevators to access the platform—one between street and mezzanine and one between mezzanine and platform.

But to access the Blue or Orange lines, riders have to transit the Branch Avenue/Huntington Platform. There is no elevator access between the Greenbelt/Fort Totten plaform and the Blue/Orange lines. And that means that riders changing from a Vienna-bound train to a Greenbelt-bound train have to use 3 elevators to make the transfer. Signage here is pretty clear, though the actual path that riders have to take is onerous.

At Gallery Place, on the other hand, signage leaves a bit to be desired. The situation here is different. From the street, elevators take riders directly to their own fare control area on the Glenmont platform. If riders are coming from or going to Glenmont-bound trains, that's pretty convenient.

To get to the Green or Yellow Lines, a second elevator trip is required. To get to Shady Grove-bound trains, riders have to navigate the Green/Yellow platform and board a third elevator. This elevator goes up, but is a dead-end for riders bound for an exit, as it only goes to the Shady Grove platform.

Yet, signage seems to indicate otherwise.

The elevator pictured above (#4) goes from the Green/Yellow line platform up to the Shady Grove platform. There is no accessible exit from the station via this elevator. A sign next to the call button says "elevator for [red dot] line to Shady Grove." But hanging from the ceiling is a sign that boldly proclaims with a wheelchair icon, "Exit to Arena, Galleries. [Red dot] all trains."

What the sign means is that both elevators are down the platform in that direction. But at that location, the sign seems to indicate that elevator #4 will take riders to all those places. In cases like this, Metro should put bold signage on the elevator, perhaps on the elevator doors themselves, that indicates precisely where the elevator goes and that it does not lead to an exit.

Metro GM Richard Sarles responded to Deena's letter, telling her that Metro was working to improve the reliability of elevators and making the system more accessible. And, according to Ms. Larsen, Metro officials actually went out with her to visit some sites in the system. It's great to hear that WMATA management are interested in raising the bar for elevator access.

But running an accessible transit system is about more than just keeping the elevators in working order. It's also about ensuring that riders can find them and know where to go once they get on board.

At the Smithsonian Station, the only elevator I could find was blocked—no explanation, no phone number, nothing. I pressed a call button, but no one came down. Finally, as I was crying in frustration, a nice couple located a guard, who explained that there had been a fire. He got my wheelchair and me up the escalator.

Unfortunately, this trip is typical of the problems faced by people who use wheelchairs and want to travel by Metro.

At Dupont Circle's south entrance, for instance, there are no directions from the escalators to the nearest elevator, 2 blocks away. At L'Enfant, getting from the Blue/Orange platform to the Green/Yellow platform or the street requires 3 elevator rides. At Fort Totten, the elevator is broken, so Metro runs shuttles from two stations, lengthening the trip time for riders who need the elevator.

It took a court order for Metro to routinely include elevators in the station design, and the elevators in the retrofitted stations are not necessarily conveniently located.

And when the elevators break, they often stay broken for a long time. The same is true for the escalators, of course, but at least a broken escalator can still be used as stairs by people who are able to climb stairs. A broken elevator, on the other hand, takes you nowhere.

Metro is fixing some of the problems. All of the stations opened in 2004 or later have (or will have) redundant elevators (2 elevators for each necessary ascent). Rosslyn station is currently getting a bank of mezzanine-to-street elevators. And plans are underway for redundant elevators (and new escalators) at Union Station.

But there is still plenty of room for improvement.

Ms. Larsen concludes her letter,

I would be very grateful if just one Metro executive went through the system in a wheelchair. Just once. That is all it would take.

How about it, Metro executives? Any volunteers?

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.