Have you ever found yourself bored on a long Metro escalator, silently wondering, “Why is this thing so slow?” That question recently popped up in a long thread on the r/washingtondc subreddit, with commenters debating whether the pace is, in fact, glacial and why. Might it be due to how many tourists use the escalators? Is it for safety or maintenance reasons? Some on Reddit even claimed the escalators were significantly faster 10 to 15 years ago, then were deliberately slowed down.
But are the escalators actually sluggish? Metro says no: The system follows the national safety-code standard of 100 feet per minute. That sounds right to Tim Marshall,
a private elevator and escalator inspector in Maryland. He tells us 100 feet per minute is actually at the top of the typical range of speeds. For comparison, we asked spokespeople for Philadelphia’s SEPTA system and San Francisco’s BART, and both said their escalators also run at 100 feet per minute.
Marshall says it’s unlikely Washington’s escalators were deliberately slowed down, because units are typically built with a set speed in mind. It’s true that in the early 2010s, Metro’s escalators frequently went out of service, prompting WMATA to replace 145 of them. And in 2021, it began a second replacement project of 139 escalators by 2028. Yet we could find no mention of any intentional slowdown in Metro’s public reports on those projects.
At the Dupont Circle station recently, riders had a lot of opinions on the topic. Eliza Starr, visiting from Chicago, noted that escalators back home feel noticeably faster, but her theory is that Metro’s are considerably longer. When the trip up and down takes a lot more time, it creates an illusion of slowness.
We talked to one DC native who thinks the escalators have always been plodding and to another rider who was certain they’d recently sped up. But ultimately, we found retired DC attorney Kristie Hansen’s take to be the most convincing. “If they’re working,” she said, “they’re good for me.”
