Fair use and education excerpts:

Headline: For Escalators and Elevators, Newer Isn't Better, Report Says

Source: NY Times, 26 Sept 2000

Dozens of new subway elevators and escalators installed during the last six years at a cost of more than $500 million have been breaking down more often than the system's older elevators and escalators, an examination by the public advocate's office has found.

Researchers for the public advocate drew their results from New York City Transit's own reliability figures for the 73 elevators and 178 escalators in place throughout the subway system. The researchers found that the 32 elevators installed since 1994 were out of service for an average of 28 days between May 1999 and April 2000. Older ones were broken for an average of 16 days during the same period. For escalators, the 70 installed since 1994 were out of service for an average of 26 days during the 1999-2000 period, while older ones were down for 22 days during that time.

The study excluded shutdowns caused by replacement, rehabilitation, preventive maintenance and vandalism...

...Transit officials said the study reflected only that the newer equipment was more technically complex, requiring additional time to work out bugs after being installed.

"That would be credible if we were just looking at machinery that had been installed in the last year or very recently," said Joseph Rappaport, Mr. Green's transit adviser. "But we're looking at things that have been in place for years."

-- Andre Weltman (aweltman@state.pa.us), September 26, 2000