Taken for a Ride

“You know, it’s just stupid,” says mechanical engineer Matt Dermond over an empty pizza box and scattered scraps of equations. “If you have a place like a mall, you could install an elevator for the elderly and the disabled and tell everyone else to take a walk. It’s not the kind of machine that you can make practical. Because it’s not.”

Dermond is talking about escalators, denigrating them as a physical extension of our convenience culture. Their primary function is to move significant numbers of people from one floor to another in an environment where conventional staircases cause traffic jams, but most of the time, they are chronically underused.

The grand hall of the cavernous Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia can hold thousands of people for special events. It is home of the International Auto Show and the extremely popular Philadelphia Flower Show. For several hours each day, however, its escalators churn truss rods and gears without a single passenger. Similar scenes play out in countless hotel lobbies, office buildings, airports, and shopping malls. Although quiet and convenient, escalators unfortunately cost more money to install, operate, and maintain than raising a child, and there are 30,000 of them in the United States.

According to statistical findings attached to the Energy Efficiency Act, which became law in 2006, 90 billion people each year ascend and descend on escalators, making it a more popular form of transportation than commercial airliners. The national energy use of escalators is estimated at 2.6 billion kilowatt hours per year, equivalent to powering 375,000 houses; its cost is roughly $260 million.

What’s harder than stomaching these statistics is finding sources to back them up. The escalator industry is extremely secretive about pricing and energy specifications on specific models. Even though Kone Inc. provides detailed CAD drawings on their website, their cheery phone representatives claim they can’t verify the figures: “it’s a 9-11 thing.” The security guards in the publicly owned Pennsylvania Convention Center prohibit filming or photographing the machines for the same purported reason. Otis Escalator sales representative Jon Fitzroy, however, says pricing, not security, is the issue. “Our company has to customize each job, so there’s never a set price,” said Fitzroy. “The installation can cost anywhere from $150,000 to half-a-million, depending on the size, type, and model you want. The maintenance all depends on what service you use.”

To understand why escalators are so expensive, start with their steps. According to U.S. Patent No. 5988350, credited to Austrian inventors Harold Nusime and Wolfgang Neszmerak, modern escalator steps are made from aluminium castings and a tread component, a molded fibrous material with a tempered binding. These parts are extremely heavy, requiring considerable labor to install and repair and lots of power to operate, and the longer the escalator, the more steps it requires.

In an ongoing quest to make the escalator more efficient, J. Dunlop Inc. has applied for a patent on a plastic escalator step in Europe. Two physics students at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey, Andrew Rosenfeld and Eric Leitner, along with Dermond, an alumnus, are also studying how to make escalator steps lighter. By using the specifications and blueprints for Otis’s model 506 NCE escalator (available online), the group determined that a passenger weighing 170 pounds, riding upwards on a 30-step escalator, will increase the energy cost of that escalator by one thousandth of a cent. It’s slightly higher going down.

“The passengers make little impact on how much energy these escalators use,” says Leitner, crunching the numbers. “It’s all running the machinery, and cooling it, too. Unless thousands of people are riding these things at once, the big, bulky aluminum steps aren’t necessary.” But while improving escalators’ efficiency could lower their energy use, they ultimately represent an outmoded method of transporting masses of people.

Although quiet and convenient, escalators unfortunately cost more money to install, operate and maintain than raising a child.”

Escalators haven’t changed much since they were invented over 100 years ago. Inventor Jesse Reno’s 1892 steam-powered design, the inclined elevator, doubled as a Coney Island amusement park ride. Charles Seeberger redesigned it in 1897 for practical use, and together with Otis Elevator Company, produced the first line of commercial escalators from their factory in Yonkers, New York.

Escalators still seem like carnival rides. The one in Washington, D.C.’s Wheaton Metro station descends 230 feet into the underground, taking almost three minutes. It is the longest uninterrupted escalator ride in the Western Hemisphere and moves hundreds of thousands of people each day. The vertiginous ride is exhausting. By contrast, the Garden State Plaza in Paramus, New Jersey, boasts the world’s shortest escalator pair in front of its JCPenney, at a comical height of six steps. Kids play on them while adults use the more practical, non-moving staircases to the left and right.

In order to cut down on wasted energy, Congress has been flirting with converting standard escalators into intermittent escalators, which run only when someone steps onto them. The Energy Efficiency Act calls for the installation of intermittent escalators in the Capitol Building, to set an example for the rest of the nation. Dermond observes, however, that unless the escalators remain dormant for long periods of time, starting up over and over again would waste more energy. “And if you did have a system that doesn’t get used that often, what is the point of having it in the first place?”