Sound Transit gets serious about permanently fixing its problematic station escalators

Live and learn:

Sound Tran­sit has giv­en up on its fail­ure-prone esca­la­tors at Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton Sta­tion next to Husky Sta­di­um, and says they’ll be replaced soon by a com­bi­na­tion of stairs and stronger escalators.

In addi­tion, the U Dis­trict Sta­tion open­ing in 2021 will be redesigned to include stairs to the low­er lev­el where peo­ple board the trains — instead of depend­ing entire­ly on esca­la­tors like the deep UW [Sta­di­um] and Capi­tol Hill Sta­tions do currently.

That will be done through a change order to the contractors.

By March of next year, an emer­gency stair­case at Capi­tol Hill Sta­tion will be con­vert­ed to all-day pub­lic use, the agency also says.

Mal­func­tion­ing esca­la­tors are the bane of tran­sit agen­cies every­where, not just around here. When I was in Paris last month, I encoun­tered bro­ken or out of ser­vice esca­la­tors in Metro sta­tions more than once. The mov­ing walk­ways found in air­ports and oth­er facil­i­ties — a cousin of esca­la­tors — also are prone to breaking.

It’s true Sound Tran­sit could have ordered the tougher “tran­sit grade” esca­la­tors for its sta­tions instead of the cheap­er com­mer­cial ones (and it should have!) but that does­n’t mean there would­n’t have been breakdowns.

The main les­son here is that it pays to invest in well engi­neered, care­ful­ly thought out sta­tions instead of try­ing to save a few bucks here and there on things like esca­la­tors — espe­cial­ly to appease naysay­ers who will nev­er be happy.

Road war­rior crit­ics of Sound Tran­sit are con­stant­ly demand­ing the impos­si­ble: build high qual­i­ty tran­sit on the cheap (and fast), or not at all.

That is a false choice which we have repeat­ed­ly rejected.

The agen­cy’s plan to con­vert esca­la­tors to stairs and replace the stan­dard esca­la­tors with the tran­sit-grade ones makes a lot of sense.

Plain old stairs can take a pound­ing and don’t go out of ser­vice at inop­por­tune times. Ele­va­tors will still be avail­able for those in wheel­chairs or walk­ers, plus rid­ers with strollers, bicy­cles, and luggage.

Sound Tran­sit is already plan­ning ahead for its new sta­tions to ensure that none have the kind of esca­la­tor bot­tle­necks that Capi­tol Hill and Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton Sta­tions have had. The plat­forms at the sta­tions that are due to open in the 2020s (like those in Belle­vue and Red­mond) will all be acces­si­ble via stairs alone, so that esca­la­tors don’t stop rid­ers from get­ting to or from the trains.

Apply­ing lessons learned from the first phase of Link light rail’s build out will def­i­nite­ly ben­e­fit sta­tions that are due to be added in the sec­ond and third phases.