"According to WMATA, this escalator is operational."

Stay to the right, guys.

The metro in DC is great - it's often orderly, on time, and clean-ish. (Of course, when something goes wrong, i.e. some anxious tourist or exhausted bureaucrat prevents the door from closing, the place makes the capsized Poseidon look like a poorly-done carnival ride.) One thing that's not great about Metro, though, is the escalators - they are so frequently incapacitated that, yes, they constitute a City Danger.

The escalator at the station near my office has been "closed for modernization" for months (I am expecting cup holders, charger outlets for my iPod, and leather) which annoyingly requires that traffic go both ways up the functioning escalator.

But I guess it is also a wonderful study in sociology, or whatever fake science it is that studies how groups of humans will stop at nothing to screw each other over when it comes to waiting in lines (ahem, queues).

Today, one of the metro employees left his fortress of solitude to do something unprecedented: conduct escalator traffic. It was about as fascinating as spotting a narwhal do, well, anything. Had he come to help increase efficiency? Sort of; he also came to deliver periodic diatribes to the not-so-patiently waiting escalator riders on why the State of Maryland (the entire thing!) would not sign off on the repairs to the sickly escalator even though WMATA had deemed it "totally fine, probably".  He then drew our attention to the following sign, posted half a dozen places around the escalators. It asks people to call the State of Maryland and complain. It also - awkwardly? - asks callers to be polite. 

I think the winner here is the State of Maryland. If the frequency of escalator failures is any indicator, then the only thing that is broken is WMATA's working definition of the word "operational".