Bethesda escalators reopened
The two escalators between the platform and mezzanine at Bethesda's Metrorail station are working again, ending a maintenance project that lasted half a year.
At any given time, scores of Metro's 588 escalators and 236 elevators are out of service. There are four out today at Union Station, for example.
But the long, drawn-out downtime at Bethesda during the spring, summer and early fall highlighted a particular aspect of the problem: The transit authority has known for years that the escalators break down frequently and are difficult to fix. But it hasn't found a way to keep them in good repair or to speed up the fixes so as to minimize the impact on riders.
If you looked at the Bethesda platform escalators as a mechanical problem, Metro's approach makes some sense: You know you have to rehabilitate those two escalators. Start by tearing up one escalator and turn off the one next to it temporarily so riders can use it as an up or down staircase. When you're done fixing the one escalator, you turn that one into a walker and tear up the other.
But if you look at it as a people-moving problem, the situation is different. Even though there's an elevator at the far end of the platform, the bank of two escalators is essentially the only way to move a lot of riders to and from the station's mezzanine. So the bottom line for people who use the station is that they had to crowd onto one stopped escalator or another for half a year.
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