Tomorrow I’ll be moving to Silver Spring, Maryland so today was possibly the last time commuting to and from the Van Ness Metro station. So now is the last time for me to logically mention something I’ve noticed over the past three months on the Red Line.
Most people know about standard escalator etiquette: Stand on the right, walk on the left. Sure you get some clueless idiots and others who are just rude and don’t care, but this unspoken rule is generally known throughout the world. But there are other less common rules of escalator etiquette – and in the Washington DC Metro system, those rules are apparently different in each station.
Throughout the DC Metro system there are escalators that are not at a far end of the train platform. Whenever a packed train unloads at one of these stations, most commuters walk straight towards the escalators and go straight up. But then there are at least a car load or two of commuters on the ends of the trains that need to walk back towards the escalators, walk around to the entrance, and then turn around 180-degrees to get on and go up. But how is the crowd going one direction supposed to merge with the crowd coming from the other direction. As a queue begins to form at the bottom of the escalators, is the crowd coming from the other side of the escalator supposed to merge right in or walk all the way to the end of the line?
Well what I find so odd is that these unspoken rules of escalator etiquette seem to be different at each Metro station – yet everybody seems to know these rules somehow.
At many Metro stations, Van Ness included, those who have to walk around to the end of the escalators always merge right in and (after turning the corner) get on the right side of the escalator. Those commuters that come from all the other cars and can walk straight on to the escalator, queue up to get on the left side. (Once on the escalator, people do “change lanes” to obey the universal “stand on the right, walk on the left” rule.) Everybody at Van Ness knows how it works and it’s not considered to be cutting the line.
But at many other Metro stations, like Dupont Circle, there seems to be a mysteriously unspoken understanding that those who have to walk back towards the escalators need to keep walking all the way to the very end of the line, which is now pretty long by the time they get to the end. Nobody ever “cuts the line”, even though they’re arriving at the bottom of the escalator at the exact same time as those “heading in the right direction”.
So it’s one odd thing that each station somehow has different rules of escalator etiquette, but it’s just weird how everybody seems to know these unspoken rules .
