How fast escalators move, city by city · The Basin (../favicon.ico) (../assets/basin-icon.svg) (https://basin.la/assets/basin-icon-180.png) (The Basin) (https://basin.la/feed.xml) (../assets/basin.css@v=259ba06e.css) (ninety-feet-a-minute.html)  Los Angeles · California (https://basin.la/your-government) Your Government (https://basin.la/data/index.html) Licensing & data Theme    (https://basin.la/index.html)                  The Basin  Data journalism from the Los Angeles Basin  (https://basin.la/your-government)        Your Government  Articles   (https://basin.la/money.html) Money  (https://basin.la/city-hall.html) Politics  (https://basin.la/crime.html) Crime  (https://basin.la/elections.html) Elections  (https://basin.la/places.html) Places    Maps   (https://basin.la/maps/intersections.html) LA's Worst Intersections  (https://basin.la/maps/elections.html) The Election Map  (https://basin.la/maps/crime.html) The Crime Map  (https://basin.la/maps/index.html) All maps    (https://basin.la/media.html) Media   (https://basin.la/media/index.html) Videos  (https://basin.la/games/index.html) Games  (https://basin.la/interactives/index.html) Interactives    Los Angeles   (https://basin.la/neighborhoods/index.html) Neighborhoods  (https://basin.la/districts/index.html) Council districts    (https://basin.la/data/index.html) Data  (https://basin.la/about.html) About    (https://basin.la/places.html)  Places LA Metro has some of the slowest escalators on earth… Why? LA Metro’s design specifications state that its escalators go 90 feet per minute, slower than nearly everything we found. By Miles Morton 2026-09-23 4 min read (ninety-feet-a-minute.html#get-the-data) Data behind this piece    (Looking up an empty escalator toward the glass canopy at Pershing Square station in downtown Los Angeles) Photo: Joey Zanotti, (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/) CC BY 2.0 via (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Covid_19_Era_Scene,_LA_Metro_-_Flickr_-_Joey_Z1.jpg) Wikimedia Commons   If you’ve ridden an escalator in Hong Kong or Singapore, the climb out of an LA Metro station can feel painfully slow. It’s really not just Metro though, American transit escalators generally operate under a much lower speed limit than those in much of the world. Why? Well honestly we don’t have the whole answer, but we did look at the rules governing escalators in 139 cities across 58 countries and came to some interesting conclusions. One of them is that LA Metro’s specified speed is below the maximum allowed in every single city on our list. That doesn’t mean we measured 139 cities’ escalators. We compared their legal limits, which tell us how fast they’re allowed to go, and then looked separately at operating speeds where we could find them. Escalator operating speeds, 42 cities   0.75 and up  0.65  About 0.5  Slower than LA  LA Metro                                                 Los Angeles   Source: Basin Data. The speed each system's escalators typically run at, in meters a second, from operator documents, a national registry, engineering papers and operators quoted in the press, each checked against its source. LA Metro's dot is the 90 feet a minute its design specifications call for.  Hong Kong has some of the fastest escalators in the world, with (https://www.emsd.gov.hk/filemanager/conferencepaper/en/upload/61/cnfrnc-paper-20150705-09-3.pdf) most MTR station escalators moving people around at 0.75 meters per second , about 148 feet a minute. Next to (https://libraryarchives.metro.net/dpgtl/architecture/2015-metro-rail-design-criteria-section6-architectural.pdf) LA’s specified 90 feet a minute , that’s about a 64% faster pace. How fast the escalators run    0.42 5 cities Busan  Daegu  Daejeon  Gwangju  Incheon   0.46 2 cities Los Angeles  New York   0.5 11 cities Berlin  Buenos Aires  Hamburg  Munich  Philadelphia  San Francisco  Seoul  Taipei  Tokyo  Warsaw  Washington   0.65 16 cities Dubai  Guangzhou  Hangzhou  Helsinki  Madrid  Nanjing  Paris  Prague  Sao Paulo  Shanghai  Shenzhen  Stockholm  Sydney  Vienna  Wuhan  Xi'an   0.75 7 cities Hong Kong  Kharkiv  London  Minsk  Moscow  Saint Petersburg  Singapore   0.9 1 city Kyiv    Source: Basin Data. Typical operating speed in meters a second; 0.46 is LA Metro's specified 90 feet a minute and 0.5 is about 100.  For a climb the height of Civic Center/Grand Park’s platform-to-street ascent, that specified speed works out to about 87 seconds standing on an escalator in LA. A trip of the same length at Hong Kong’s usual speed would take about 53. Civic Center’s Escalator Climb after 53 seconds          STREET PLATFORM    65 ft    Hong Kong, 148 ft/min at the street   Metro 1984, 120 ft/min 12 s to go   US limit, 100 ft/min 25 s to go   LA Metro, 90 ft/min 34 s to go   Source: Metro's 1983 station drawing for Civic Center/Grand Park, street to platform about 65 feet, drawn to scale as one 30-degree escalator. Riders standing still, with LA Metro at its specified 90 feet a minute.  So if we could suddenly make LA’s escalators that fast, how much time would people actually get back? (Crowded escalators at Central station on Hong Kong's MTR) Central station on Hong Kong’s MTR. Photo: MiGAIS MinFengau, (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) CC0 via (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HK_Central_MTR_Station_escalators_n_visitors_n_ads_April_2025_R12S.jpg) Wikimedia Commons   Metro counts 115 stations and says it has 171 station escalators, but for this calculation we focused on the 27 underground stations. Using FY2026 station ridership figures circulated from a public-records response, we arrive at about 300,000 minutes of escalator riding on an average weekday, or about 1.7 million hours a year. Modeled weekday escalator minutes                                                                     Union Station  Civic Center  7th St/Metro Center North Hollywood    10,000   50,000 minutes   Source: LA Metro FY2026 average weekday boardings (public-records response); Basin model. The 27 underground stations, every rider taking the escalator in and out, standing, at Civic Center's depth and Metro's specified 90 feet a minute. Union Station also counts riders on its street-level platforms, and changes between lines inflate 7th St/Metro Center.  There are some pretty big assumptions here. We treated every underground station as roughly as deep as Civic Center, ran every escalator at Metro’s specified 90 feet a minute and assumed everyone takes the escalator, standing still, both in and out. People obviously also walk, take the stairs or use elevators. Transfers complicate the ridership figures, and we left elevated stations out entirely, so this is a rough model rather than an actual count of everyone’s time. Read next (https://basin.la/articles/one-percent-of-the-land.html) Downtown LA is 1% of the land and 16% of LA’s jobs  But under those assumptions, matching Hong Kong’s usual speed would save about 119,000 minutes every weekday, or about 670,000 hours a year. For someone commuting between two underground stations every workday, the modeled saving is about 9.5 hours annually. The problem is we can’t just turn them up.  Escalator operators choose their speeds within limits set by safety codes. Most of the cities we examined follow one of two main standards, or a national version of them. The European standard allows 0.75 meters per second at inclines up to 30 degrees. The American standard caps escalators at 100 feet a minute, about 0.508 meters per second. (https://www.dir.ca.gov/title8/3141_11.html) California uses that 100-foot limit for new installations and speed alterations.  Metro’s specified 90 is another 10% below that. (https://www.lawa.org/-/media/lawa-web/tenants411/file/dch2015/guide_specs/14_31_00_transit-type-escalators-lawa-generic-spec-dec-2011.ashx) LAX, meanwhile, specifies the full 100 feet a minute , so even within Los Angeles we have an airport escalator specification that’s 11% faster than the subway’s. Getting Metro to that American maximum would save 10% of the riding time in our model, about 30,000 minutes each weekday. What would it cost? We don’t have a reliable price for making that change across Metro’s system. Matching Hong Kong would be a bigger project still, involving both the code limit and whether the equipment could accommodate the higher speed. And faster isn’t automatically better for every rider. (https://liftescalatorlibrary.org/paper_indexing/papers/00000151.pdf) Singapore’s transit engineers measured nearly twice as much step vibration at 0.75 meters per second as at 0.5. Their escalators use the faster setting during rush hour and the slower one off-peak. (Riders on the long escalators down into Bras Basah station on Singapore's MRT) Bras Basah station, Singapore. Photo: Katmorro, (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) CC BY-SA 3.0 via (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Escalators_in_Bras_Basah_MRT_Station,_Singapore.jpg) Wikimedia Commons   Speed also has very real safety stakes, and that’s where our next dive into escalators is headed. Still, the strangest thing we found was in LA’s own archives. (https://libraryarchives.metro.net/DPGTL/scrtd/1985-system-design-criteria-and-standards-volume-3-stations.pdf) The original subway design rules required escalators capable of running at both 90 and 120 feet a minute. At 120, that Civic Center climb would take about 66 seconds instead of 87. Metro's escalator rule  1984     2015      Source: SCRTD Metro Rail System Design Criteria and Standards, Vol. III, sec. 23.6.1.C, Revision 2, 1984; Metro Rail Design Criteria, sec. 6.14.6, Revision 9, 2015.  We don’t know whether the installed escalators ever actually ran at 120, or when and why that requirement disappeared. The American code lowered its maximum from 125 to 100 in 2000, but we haven’t established a connection between that change and Metro’s decision. What we do know is that LA’s original subway planners required a faster option. Somewhere between those plans and the later rulebook, we lost it. CORRECTION, 2026-09-24. An earlier version said LA Metro’s escalators go 90 feet per minute. That’s the speed Metro’s design specifications call for, and the piece now says so. A reader measured two of Metro’s newer Schindler escalators at 98.4 feet per minute, just under the American maximum, so at least some of the system runs faster than its own specification. We’re asking Metro how its escalators are set. Keep reading (https://basin.la/articles/one-percent-of-the-land.html)  Places Downtown LA is 1% of the land and 16% of LA’s jobs →  (https://basin.la/articles/the-half-that-came-back.html)  Places International traffic at LAX has nearly recovered. The real shortfall is domestic →  (https://basin.la/articles/where-los-angeles-eats.html)  Places Half the restaurants in Los Angeles sit in 20 of its 114 neighborhoods →   Get The Basin by email Our bi-weekly newsletter covering everything we're up to here at The Basin (you@example.com) Subscribe  Thanks. Check your email to confirm.  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