Escalators came as a boon to weary-legged travellers and are now an indispensable part of most of the infrastructure in the big cities. Mumbai, which is the financial capital of India, also abounds in escalators to ease the pain of commuters.
There are several such electric staircases installed across railway platforms in the city also. However, going by government data, it seems that they are not exactly serving the purpose they were built for.
Take the escalators at Thane station for example. The stop button there is pressed 361 times daily on an average, reports the Mumbai Mirror. The ones at Dadar (Central) are pressed close to 250 times while that at Kalyan is stopped more than 100 times every day.
The 76 escalators installed in platforms on the Central Railway, were paused 1.2 lakh times in the past 16 months, revealed Railway data. The escalators were thus stopped for 250 times a day on an average, between April 2018 and July 2019.
What’s shocking is that most of the times (1.12 lakh times, i.e., 233 times/ day) escalators were stopped by people who pressed the button for ‘fun’. Only 8,000 times the pauses were not a result of truant commuters pulling off a prank. Which means, about 16 times a day, the elevators would not function due to genuine technical snags or items getting stuck in the stairs, the data revealed. However, technical glitches contributed to less than 1% of the shutdowns.
Commenting on it, Shivaji Sutar, the chief PRO of the Central Railway said: “There have also been failures caused by people damaging escalator handrails and throwing things like slippers, keys, and pieces of cloth into the machine on purpose.”
However, the fate of escalators in Western Railway was comparatively better than their Central line counterparts. In the same six-month period, the 50 WR escalators saw 1.06 lakh shutdowns only. These add up to about 221 shutdowns daily on an average.
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