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The Downside of Escalator Renovation
A line to exit forms each morning inside Judiciary Square Station because the one open escalator is immobile. More than 14,000 passengers use the exit on a typical weekday.
(By Sarah L. Voisin -- The Washington Post)
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History, however, suggests that escalator problems are a constant.
In the mid-1990s, Metro officials decided to replace 28 of the worst-performing escalators in an experiment they now acknowledge was a disaster. The agency spent $16.4 million, only to watch some of the new escalators fall apart. Others were less reliable than the escalators they replaced.
Mechanics had to learn their way around four new kinds of escalators because Metro had purchased them from four different manufacturers. The manufacturers later left the business or merged, leaving no reliable source for parts. Now, Metro is planning to spend $15.5 million to replace half of those escalators.
By the late 1990s, Metro officials had decided to switch tactics. Instead of replacing aging escalators, they would gut the old ones and rebuild them with new parts.
"We learned our lesson," said Paul C. Gillum Jr., who formerly ran Metro's elevator and escalator office and is now director of plant maintenance.
David Lacosse, the current head of the elevator and escalator office, points to statistics over an 18-month period showing that, on average, rebuilt escalators were out of service 5 percent of the time, compared with 13 percent before the work was done.
But that improvement is driven largely by a fraction of the rehabilitated escalators, those whose previous performance was so bad that they were out of service at least 25 percent of the time, records show.
In fact, more than half of the overhauled escalators performed worse or showed only marginal improvement, according to an analysis. Of the 128 escalators for which Metro has statistics, 44 were out of service more often than before they were rebuilt. Reliability for another 23 improved by less than 2 percent.
Metro officials trace some of the problems to faulty, overly sensitive safety devices installed on the rebuilt escalators. More generally, Metro is "always going to have one-unit problems here and there," Lacosse said. The important thing to consider, he said, "is where we would be if we didn't make this investment at all."
Recently, the Metro board decided to overhaul 41 more escalators.
Metro's program to maintain the equipment also is troubled.
In 1997, an investigation found that escalator mechanics were falsifying records, claiming to have completed maintenance work that was never performed.
