The Slowcalator

LA Metro runs its escalators at 90 feet a minute, slower than almost anywhere on Earth. Standing still, the ride up from Civic Center/Grand Park takes 87 seconds. Hong Kong's escalators would do it in 53. Walk it.

Civic Center/Grand Park · 65 ft down

The escalator is moving. Barely.

Tap the left or right side to take a step in that lane. People are standing everywhere. Bump one three times and they squeeze aside. Real seconds, real LA speed: standing still takes 87 s. Target: 53 s, Hong Kong's escalator.

Phone: tap left or right half · Keyboard: ← →

Odd News Desk23–27 Sep 2026

What actually happened

LA Metro specifies its escalators at 90 feet per minute (0.46 m/s). That is 10% below the usual American speed of 100 feet a minute, and below the maximum allowed in every city Basin.LA compared.
Hong Kong's MTR runs most station escalators at 0.75 m/s, about 148 feet a minute. London's Underground standard is also 0.75 m/s. New York matches LA. The slowest Basin.LA measured were in South Korean cities such as Busan and Incheon, at 0.425 m/s.
At Civic Center/Grand Park, the platform is about 65 feet below the street, one 30-degree escalator away. Standing still, that ride takes about 87 seconds in LA, 78 at the US standard speed, and 53 at Hong Kong's.
Metro says it has 171 station escalators. Basin.LA estimates LA riders spend about 1.7 million hours a year on escalators in its 27 underground stations; a daily commuter would save about 9.5 hours a year at Hong Kong speed.
Faster is not automatically better: when an escalator outruns walking pace by too much, people stumble or hesitate at the ends and the whole thing jams (CityMonitor). Washington DC's Metro runs at 100 feet a minute, which inspectors call the top of the normal range.

What the game makes up

The crowd, the three-bumps rule and the tired legs are ours. The escalator's speed, height and the three target times are real. We count the 130-foot slope as 99 steps of about 40 cm. Please don't shove anyone on a real escalator.

Sources

Basin.LA: LA Metro has some of the slowest escalators on earth (23 Sep 2026) Hacker News discussion CityMonitor: why not just run escalators faster? Washingtonian: are DC Metro's escalators unusually slow? Wikipedia: Escalator etiquette

Tear off today's page for a friend

Grab the little page and pull it down to rip it off. Your friend gets a torn calendar page with your name on it, and the site greets them with “you tore this off for them”.

Tell the agent what happened today

Seen something odd and true? An animal on the loose, a ridiculous world record, a baffling local rule, something weird in your town. Type it here. Half-formed is fine.

1You send it. You get a ticket to follow it.

2Every morning the agent reads every sighting, checks the facts and writes you a one-line note.

3If it's picked, it becomes that day's page, with your name on it.

The Slowcalator

The escalator is moving. Barely.

41.2 seconds

Tear off today's page for a friend

My guesses

Wrong guesses

Unsolved

Not today

Tell the agent what happened today