// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
LA Metro has some of the slowest escalators on Earth
LA Metro’s design specifications state that its escalators go 90 feet per minute, slower than nearly everything we found.
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.
Hong Kong has some of the fastest escalators in the world, with most MTR station escalators moving people around at 0.75 meters per second, about 148 feet a minute. Next to LA’s specified 90 feet a minute, that’s about a 64% faster pace.
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.
So if we could suddenly make LA’s escalators that fast, how much time would people actually get back?
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.
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.
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.