The escalators on the east entrance of the Tenleytown Metro Station reopened Wednesday after being closed for repairs for six months.
The escalators were scheduled to reopen Jan. 10 after about five months of repairs, but were not opened until last week as District- and state-mandated inspections caused delays, said Metro spokesman Steve Taubenkibel.
"A complete overhaul of the system usually takes four to five months," Taubenkibel said. "This was the case with Cleveland Park and Tenleytown [stations], which are currently under rehabilitation programs."
Some students said they were happy the escalators were functioning again.
"It [was] definitely an inconvenience," said Paula Chrin, a freshman in the School of Communication, who travels by Metro about six times per week. "It slows down travel time a lot, even just walking down the stairs. ... Sometimes I use the elevators because it's faster."
Broken escalators are common in the Metro system and cause a variety of problems. One outage in a heavy traffic area can cause long queues, bottlenecks and delays.
"The Metrorail system is heavily dependent on escalators to function smoothly," Taubenkibel said.
There are 86 Metrorail stations with more than 550 escalators operating at any given time, according to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transport Authority Web site. As of Thursday, 32 escalators were out of service.
Most of the damage done to the escalators comes from the pounding the stairs take from a daily average of 600,000-700,000 pairs of feet, Taubenkibel said.
"A lot of the trouble comes from people in a hurry who run up and down and jump the last few stairs," said Taubenkibel. He said the average lifespan of an escalator ranges from 10 to 20 years, depending on traffic and use.
Bumps or jolts to the stair surface trigger sensitive safety devices, which stop the escalator belt from moving and must be manually reset before they can be mobile again.
A safety switch or a tune-up takes a few days to fix. More thorough repairs, such as the replacement of an entire escalator system, require months of work.
Many students didn't mind climbing the stairs while the Tenleytown escalators were out of service, but were annoyed with the outage for other reasons.
"For me it's more of a safety hazard issue," said Caroline Barrett, a sophomore in the School of Public Affairs. "Climbing up the stairs when it's raining is dangerous because they're slippery and people can fall down."
Others noted that the time period the escalators were out seemed extensive.
"What I don't understand is how they can have both escalators under construction for such a long period of time," said Elyse Franko, a freshman in the School of International Service. "It's not really an inconvenience for me; it's just weird it takes them so long to fix it, and I can see how it would be a burden to older people."
Taubenkibel said the Tenleytown east side escalators should now be operable and that the city will begin restoring the west side escalators shortly.
