DSTT escalators still a problem

Out of service escalators at Westlake Station.
Credit: Bruce Englehardt

Last Thursday's Rider Experience Committee meeting featured an update on the parlous state of the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel's escalators. While the overall system has recovered from some early hiccups with the three new stations, the current snapshot* shows 1 elevator and 13 escalators out of service, all in the DSTT. This involves all four stations, which have 36 escalators in total. None of these have an official repair date.

Deputy Director of Vertical Conveyances John Carini reports that four of these outages are due to water intrusion" issues and they hope to recover these by mid-November. A source reports that the narrow street-level up escalator for the NE corner of Pioneer Square is among these four.

Astoundingly, this a substantial improvement from Sound Transit's assumption of maintenance responsibility on January 1st, when 28 of 58 elevators and escalators were down after Metro intentionally neglected them in favor of operating more buses.

Mr. Carini outlined some of the difficulties in building a schedule to replace these devices and comprehensively solve the problem, and did not offer such a schedule in this presentation.

One challenge Carini noted was 24 incidents of passenger misuse" of these systems. He did not elaborate, but this is surely part of the reason we can't have nice things.

*allegedly updated every 24 hours," but not since November 1.