AMNY Subway Tracker

In the ever-growing interest in making things "green," the Transit Authority is installing experimental "green" escalators. The machines go to sleep, moving at a fraction of their usual speed, in the late night hours. By slowing down the escalators save energy and suffer less wear and tear, officials said.

Green and red sensors at the top and bottom indicate whether the machine is awake. When a customers approaches a sleeping escalator it's supposed to wake up and move back to full speed. After a little while the machine falls back to sleep.

Transit is putting in 24 sleepy escalators as part of the total 169 the agency operates in the subway system. Only the ones at Herald Square have been installed.

Thomas Kenny, principal mechanical engineer for NYC Transit, said that the high tech escalator cost about $5,500 more than the average, which cost more than a million dollars.

Each escalator should save $1,800 in energy costs over a year, Transit spokesman Charles Seaton said.

- Herald Square in Manhattan (12 installed waiting to be switched on)
- Roosevelt Island on the F train (4 to come)
- Jamaica Center on the E/J/Z (6 to come)
- Jamaica-Van Wyck on the E (2 to come)

It was not immediately clear if there was anyway to stop smart-aleck kids from stepping in front of the sensors over and over to play with the motion sensitive escalators.

(Photo courtesy of NYC Transit)

The management at Zeckendorf Towers on Union Square took a new step in the ongoing saga of its delays in replacing the broken escalators at the southeast entrance to the station. The building, which has responsibility for the escalators (in return for which it received permission to build more floor space), is encasing them in a box.

Curbed has these pictures of the sheet rock enclosure in progress.

The broken escalators, which are the kind meant for use inside stores not subways, have been out of service for years by all accounts.

Ann Marie Mannino, assistant property manager of One Irving Place (aka Zeckendorf Tower), said, "The MTA requires we put a protective cover over it so no one gets hurt."

The management is waiting to hear back from a consultant it hired to look at the escalators and plans on replacing them, she said. They have no schedule as yet.

The Straphangers Campaign called on NYC Transit to make a public accounting of all the broken escalators and elevators in the subway system that are privately owned like the ones at Union Square.

“First, the failure to list these escalators and elevators undermines the credibility and usefulness of New York City Transit’s reporting,” Gene Russianoff, senior attorney for the NYPIRG’s Straphangers Campaign wrote in a letter to NYC Transit president Howard Roberts. “From the public's point of view, a broken escalator is broken, no matter who owns it. Second, posting the status of these facilities could help put pressure on the independent operators to fix them.”

Russianoff said the letter followed a group of stories in amNew York that detailed long-standing problems with broken escalators at Union Square and at 53rd and Third Avenue that are all privately owned. Broken for years, it seemed that no one was being held accountable for repairs.

The devices were part of deals that the city and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority struck with real estate developers giving them lucrative expansions to their buildings above the stations in return for building and maintaining amenities to the subway stations below.

Russianoff said Roberts deserves credit for the MTA web page that keeps a running list of transit-operated escalators and elevators that are out of service.

“It’s hard to believe that 14th Street isn’t on the list because it’s privately owned,” he said.

A transit spokesman could not be immediately reached for comment Monday evening.