this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2024
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That sucks. Sounds like your kid is around four?
A little older, but he's a bit anxious about certain things
Escalators definitely can cause anxiety and a surprising number of adults don't know how to use them safely. I always stand at least four steps behind people on the up escalator because the number of people that will step off the escalator and just stop while they decide which direction to pick next is shocking.
I think that if you pick a fun place to visit and then do escalator drills, the same way that we teach kids to cross roads safely, then it might help with the anxiety. Also it's something that will hopefully pass on generationally.
I watched videos of deadly escalator incidents as a kid on the internet and I won’t go anywhere near them both then and now as I’ve done more research on them as an adult. That kid is right to be anxious about these in my opinion.
They typically don’t have any sort of automatic cutoff because the way they operate is a fixed speed at variable loads. So if a foreign object gets sucked into the machinery it will pass that foreign object through without a hiccup. The guards in place to prevent the intrusion of foreign objects are inadequate and the addition of a manual emergency cutoff is not adequate either.
The foam type of shoes, like crocs or those foam soled Nike’s for example, are very easy to get caught in the machinery when, for instance, you try and “polish” your shoes against the brushes on the side. Typically children wear those shoes, typically children don’t have the foresight to think that’s a bad idea, and the data shows that typically it’s children involved in fatal escalator incidents. It’s a bad design, ban escalators, turn them all into stairs.
These problems get worse when escalators are not properly maintained, and it’s expensive to maintain escalators properly. They will only get more unsafe with time as the metaphorical copper continues getting ripped out of the walls of our economy and maintenance budgets collapse.
I got a croc caught in the side of an escalator as a kid. Fortunately it just yanked the shoe off my foot, mangled it, and spit it out at the top.
I don't like escalators anymore.
That was my worst nightmare, I'm glad all you lost was a shoe.![emoji rat-salute rat-salute](https://www.hexbear.net/pictrs/image/94bcb899-8542-45fb-9dd7-b4a49a944346.png)
While this is true, the actual risk in terms of incidents per escalator journey taken are miniscule. The risk of being seriously injured in an escalator incident is similar to that of being struck by lightning, which is not, for most people, a daily concern.
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