Safety madness, chapter 501
Posted by Dalton48 on 22 Jun 2007 at 08:42 am | Tagged as: Current Events, Toronto
The Toronto Transit Commission has not only removed the “walk left, stand right” signs from its escalators, it’s also suggesting that no one should walk on the escalators at all:
“The intent is for the escalator to carry people up the escalator. If they are capable of walking, they should be utilizing the stairs.
Now, being impatient by nature, I’m all for taking the stairs where possible — which would not include, say, King station at rush hour, Union station on the weekend, or any number of other locations where the escalator is effectively the only way to go up or down while the stairs take traffic going in the opposite direction. But I digress.
The reason we should all “step on carefully, hold the handrail, ride all the way to the stop, and then step off” escalators, to quote the Elevator Escalator Safety Foundation of Canada, is because it’s unsafe to walk on a moving staircase.
If only the TTC statistics published with the Globe and Mail story corroborated this assertion:
Number of TTC riders injured on escalators last year: 138
Number injured on stairs: 191
I look forward to next year’s press release detailing the reduction in anticipated escalator injuries — but I won’t expect to see any statistics about stairs on it.
While I sympathize with your argument (and personally always try to walk on escalators) I’m not sure quoting those stats fully supports it. It’s not the raw number of injuries on the two alternatives that’s important, but the % of travelers injured.
If there were 1,380,000 escalator trips last year but 19,100,000 stair trips, that would make the stairs 10 times safer to use than the escalators. ‘course, we don’t have these stats, so it could work either way.
In any case, they’re not arguing that you should be taking the stairs, they’re arguing that you shouldn’t be walking on the escalators. To make a case for or against that, you’d need:
- number injured in escalator walking incidents / number of people walking on escalators
vs
- number injured standing meekly on an escalator like a sheep / number of people standing lazily on escalators
Oops, did my bias slip in there? How silly of me.
Yes, of course you’re right, but here are my assumptions:
- empirical evidence suggests that where there is an escalator available, the vast majority of passengers will use it. Based on this, it could be inferred that the rate of accidents on stairs outstrips the rate of all accidents
- the Globe article also quotes someone saying that most escalator accidents involve someone walking fast and bumping someone else
- thus, if these these fast-walking louts migrate to the stairs, they can be expected to cause accidents at the same rate as they do on (relatively safer) escalators
Of course there are some flaws in this model — for example, how many escalators vs. sets of stairs are there in the system? How does the stairs vs. escalator usage really break down, and does that have to be adjusted to reflect heavier escalator usage at busier stations? How could the breakdown be scaled to account for under-repair or stopped escalators? How many escalator accidents involved people walking on escalators vs. escalator malfunctions? How many escalator accidents involve frail older people, who may not be “in the way” as often on stairs?
Sounds like an excellent project for the Technical Standards and Safety Authority.
Since people are going to walk on the escalators regardless, the safest option is to informally separate standers and walkers by putting up signs saying ‘walk left, stand right’.
That is all.
191 injuries in how many TTC trips? 200 million or something? Fuss over nothing.
How many people injured themselves falling up or down the stairs on buses?
Complete silliness. GH and MCP are right on point. People (maybe especially bureaucrats) are utterly irrational about the risks they get fired up over. Perhaps if all those escalator walkers drove to work instead we’d all be safer…
Also: given that drivers in North America seem to have a difficult time with the “pass on the left” concept, perhaps not surprising the subway system has the same problem with “walk left stand right.”
People certainly aren’t very good at escalator etiquette where I live. However, I’ll take this as an excuse for a related complaint: with the people who try to crowd onto the subway before others can get off. There’s almost no logical reason why that is a good idea (maybe they’re hoping to grab the last seat, but good luck at the station where I catch the train). Basically, it’s some ativistic impulse to be at the head of the line, whether or not it provides any benefit. My anecdotal conclusion (certainly not original) is this:
1. small, crowded insular countries (Britain, Japan) — good at queuing.
2. Large, continent-sprawling countries (U.S., China) — not so much.