Three Montgomery County Council members are pleading with Metro again to accelerate the planned repairs of escalators at the Bethesda station — and come up with ways to ease the pain in the meantime.
In a letter sent Thursday to Metro’s general manager, Council President Roger Berliner, D-Bethesda, and at-large members Nancy Floreen and Hans Reimer said the outages have continued at the station even since they last wrote to him in January.
The problem creates an inconvenience for riders. And the station entrances and platform become “very crowded” during complete outages, they said.
“If our constituents avoid Metrorail because of poor escalator performance and ineffective outage mitigation, our entire community suffers,” they wrote.
It’s the latest round of back-and-forth communication over nearly a year. In February, Metro General Manager Richard Sarles had promised them an “extensive effort” to inform the community about outages.
But the council members asked about the status of his efforts. They ask whether train operators announce escalator outages before arriving at stations. They also want information on whether the agency has strategies to manage the crowds during an outage, and whether senior citizens, children and the disabled customers get priority on elevators during those times.
They also called for him to accelerate the schedule for repairing the escalators.
Last July, Metro touted its plans to replace the escalators at the station entrance. But the work isn’t slated to start until early 2014, and similar projects at the agency are taking more than eight months, meaning riders could have to wait until 2015 to get new equipment there.
The Bethesda station has the second longest escalators in the transit system, at 212 feet, according to Metro, behind only Wheaton’s 230-foot moving staircases.
Updated, 4:55 p.m.:
While Sarles has not formally responded to the councilmembers’ letter yet, agency officials discussed the issue last week with regional officials, according to Metro spokesman Dan Stessel.
“Fully replacing the outdated, unreliable entrance escalators at Bethesda is a top priority for us, and the Capital Program being voted on this Thursday will provide the funding to keep this project on schedule,” he wrote in an e-mail.
