It’s a running joke in our neighborhood: the Metro escalators aren’t working. It’s mostly been anecdotal though, every time you go, they’re turned off, broken or closed for repair. People have to carry big suitcases up and down, or just trudge their tired bodies up and down after a long day.
I even created a joke Twitter account about this problem which just tweets various versions of “no” to the question “are the Columbia Heights Metro escalators working?”
But now we know for sure that our escalators are among the worst. The Washingtonian published a chart about the worst performing Metro escalators, and Columbia Heights and Georgia Ave are 4th and 6th worst out of 91 stations, respectively. To no one’s surprise. Thanks, Metro.
And that’s even before the many months of repairs that are coming up: some escalators at Columbia Heights and Georgia Ave. Metro will be closed for 35 to 45 weeks! That means you can get pregnant now, gestate a human baby to full term, and the escalators will still be under construction. If they actually finish when they say they will.
The data comes from DC Metro Metrics, a site that takes open data from Metro and logs it.
