Goodbye Standing Around

I’ve encountered many people with a mortal fear of escalators. On the metro, there’s a queue at the ticket counter, a queue at the customer care centre, a queue at the security check, a queue to get in the train, a queue to get off, a queue to get out of the station and just as you’re about to pat yourself on the back for your endurance, there’s a queue to get on the escalator because someone’s trying to summon the courage to step on it. It’s pretty funny at first because they almost behave as if you’re asking them to jump onboard a moving train. But I don’t imagine it’s easy to face your fears when everyone asks you to hurry up.

Patience is at a premium at this point. There are those who are in an awful hurry and have had it with queues. They push everyone aside, pretty annoyed that they can’t part crowds like Moses parted seas, get on the escalator and start running on it. Perhaps they feel rather smart about adding their own speed to the escalator's, but given how crowded most metro stations tend to be, this isn’t any more helpful than leaning forward on a bicycle to make yourself more aerodynamic and imagining that this will get you through the traffic in half the time. These mixed signals are not amenable to any behavioural modelling. An escalator is an expression of laziness. Urgency does not go with it. 

I have also discovered that escalators can double up as shoe polishers. Delhi’s wonderfully quirky populace ensures that I never stop learning new things. People run their shoes on the deflector brushes along the sides of the escalator, often turning around and rotating their foot to make sure their shoes are perfectly clean: intriguingly meticulous for someone who left home wearing dirty shoes. Sometimes I just have to feel proud of our ability to optimise. 

Safety, impatience, rationality and unbridled athleticism – four excellent reasons for people with clean shoes to avoid escalators, but neo-rationalists don’t think quite so linearly. It’s not that I’m afraid of escalators or oppose them on health grounds. I just have trouble believing that you can get where you want to simply by standing around.