No Innovation around Escalators?
I often go to the mall near my apartment in Jersey City and see several escalators there. One thing which always amazed me is why at 2:00 AM in the night the escalators are running continuosly? And all of them just going up and down .. all alone. You will find similar scenario all over the place. Every town, every public place which has escalators.
So I started to read up on energy required to run an escalator. I came across this article from Treehugger.
”The national energy use of escalators is estimated at 2.6 billion kilowatt hours per year, equivalent to powering 375,000 houses; its cost is roughly $260 million.”
Can’t there be some logic to auto-start the escalators? Well, in the same article you will see that frequent start and stop might cost more energy. Well in that case, there should be some intelligence in the logic — which will check if its day time, or if the time gap between people riding is very less then don’t auto stop and start — it should run continuously. However if there are fewer people coming on-board it means that either its night time or slack time. So it should automatically switch in some auto-start/stop mode.
In addition, the logic for upward escalator should be different than downwards. Well downward escalator should start only if there are minimum say 5 people riding .. else it should be in stop mode only. In addition there can be a switch like we have in elevator which we press if we want to ride it.
And yes, this should be done to all existing escalators … please don’t say that we cannot do this for existing escalators.
So this is what can be done:
1. Have a sensor for Auto ON and OFF — to the existing and new escalators
2. ON and OFF logic for downwards and upward escalators should be different.
3. There should be a start escalator button for people which can be used to start an escalator if it’s stopped (meaning one can skip to start the escalator)
