Redirection is all one needs to set things right

Metro escalator

Sometimes you need to redirect your effort because you may be making the effort, but it may be in the wrong direction or a dead end.

No matter how hard you try, you cannot reach your destination if you keep hitting the dead end. What do you do when driving and you suddenly hit a dead end? You take a U-turn and find a different way. In short, you re-direct your driving effort.

So, I board the metro every day from this metro station, and everything was in its place, except the escalator. For platform 1, the lone escalator, instead of going up, was going down.

Anyone who had to board the elevated metro had to climb up the stairs, and anyone alighting the metro could use the escalators to go down and exit the station.

Escalators are preferred when going from level to elevation, climbing up, because climbing requires more effort. But here was a metro station, due to space constraints, had a single escalator, but the escalator was going down instead of the opposite.

Ideally, we should have two escalators, one each for either direction, but if the layout has space to accommodate one escalator, the escalator would be designed to go up.

I noticed it and wondered why was it designed this way? And the metro has been for more than a decade, although I moved to my place two months ago.

However, this week metro authorities realised what I had observed and redirected the escalator at platform 1. So now the escalator goes up and not the other way.