Escalators: We're Not Doing it Wrong (Mostly)

good morning John it's Friday I think that we have all been in this situation at one point or another I'm on the home screen of my YouTube app YouTube shows me a thumbnail and then I'm on the desktop homepage and it shows it to me again showing up at the autoplay after veritasium video on black holes super really must think this video is right for me and Sega cave and he watch the unseen inefficiency of escalator etiquette and uh okay first the title is fine there is unseen inefficiency caused by escalator etiquette the thumbnail and the video however are making a case the split is wrong is it let's go through the argument escalators move all the time so they can carry far more people than elevators this capacity is why we use point number two in cities there is an unspoken and sometimes explicit rule that you should stand on the right so people can walk on the left point number three this split decreases the carrying capacity of the escalator because walkers take up more space than standards and this is somewhat surprisingly true it is the principal inefficiency in the unseen and efficiency of escalator etiquette then we have a bit of a leap in the end the video goes so far as to suggest that individuals start some kind of mass cultural protests standing on the left and the right in order to stop the Menace of inefficient escalators and start the revolution except that this didn't really seem right to me and probably doesn't do a lot of other people because the problem this video endeavors to solve with this mass cultural shift is the problem of over capacity escalators but escalators are almost never at capacity the Holborn station metro experiment in London this was an escalator that was often at capacity it's also a very long escalator so most people choose to stand leaving one side of the escalator almost entirely empty and even in this situation they only had standing on both sides during peak times in that situation at that station yes it is better for everybody to stand but in the vast majority of situations escalators are nowhere near capacity because capacity is what escalators are so good at so to summarize the situation what's the right way to ride an escalator it depends this split isn't the best solution except when it is which is almost all the time the 2014 study cited in the video actually only recommends standing on both sides during emergencies which by the way you should stand on escalators during an emergency especially if there are a lot of people behind you two people per step no running no walking that is good advice but it's not advice that's gonna get you YouTube clicks and ultimately that's why I'm making this dumb video right now I've been writing professionally on the internet for a long time like for scale like I started before Milly Bobby Brown existed so I'm perfectly aware of the hoops that you can jump through to make something that's pretty interesting become like a right just click I wrote a media company we talk all the time about how a scishow topic isn't good unless it surprises people rate estas and media isn't toward one side of a political spectrum or the other it's toward interesting terrible story because that's the biggest bias our audience has now am I saying that this escalator video is bad yes it was very close to not being bad inefficiency absolutely start the revolution no this is the difficulty of being a creator or a media company in a world with like infinite content we have to chase the interesting so much so that sometimes we end up manufacturing the interesting I could have picked a billion other videos I'm aware of that it shows this one is a fairly non-controversial example so I apologize to the person who made it because it was like a pretty well-done video it was very interesting lots of good facts it manufactured some interesting that didn't exist I have also been guilty of this especially early in my blogging career the reason I'm making this video is because like a lot of people crash course Destin from smarter every day many many other people are starting to realize that like we need to be taking this stuff more seriously and paying attention to how our buttons are getting pushed by the content that we're enjoying and ingesting because maybe if we all start taking our clicks a little more seriously we can start the revolution John I'll see you on Tuesday John thank you for your amazing video from sierra leone i'm linking to it right here everybody needs to go watch this that's all

Channel: vlogbrothers

Views: 222,255

Rating: 4.9699812 out of 5

Keywords: escalators, cheddar, escalator ettiquite, efficiency, capacity, media criticism, media, literacy, media literacy, youtube

Id: 68Jx54WDMzQ

Length: 3min 59sec (239 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2019