A Modest Proposal for the Stuyvesant Escalators

Stuyvesant has a problem. Our escalators, the crown jewel of the school, are congested, much like the roads of this great city. Every passing period, their efficiency decreases as a crowd of students is reduced to one, or at best, two lines of people who are slowly ferried up the escalator. This is unacceptable. These escalators do not respect your time, but I do. And there is one easy solution to bring our escalators up to speed: an overclock button. 

Let me simply outline this plan: we install cameras to watch all the escalators in the building. This video feed is then processed by AI to determine in real time how fast the escalator should go. For example, in times of congestion, the AI could dynamically speed up the escalator to keep the crowd at bay. When times are slower, such as in the middle of class periods, the escalators could be slowed to normal speeds to reduce tension on the mechanical parts. There would also be an installation of a manual override button at the bases to set the escalators to five times speed. It would be structured like a fire alarm: covered in glass that has to be lifted. Once the button is hit, an alarm plays overhead, and a countdown from three begins. It begins speeding up as soon as it’s hit, but it only reaches maximum speed after three seconds so as to not put too much strain on the escalator in one go. When the escalator is moving at rapid speeds, the capacity more than doubles because there is no longer a need (nor an option) to walk up the left side. No longer will we have to engage in the absurd activity of leaving half of the space open for a few people to get up slightly faster. It’s time to make the escalators more equal. 

In the interest of creating a truly flawless design, I randomly questioned people in the hallways for their opinions and criticism. 

“This would be horrible for safety,” one very disinterested sophomore said. I was unable to get back to them with a comment, so this one goes out to them. This is an understandable, yet idiodic concern, don’t worry. Safety is a top concern. Like a car starting and stopping, the first and last seconds of the escalator ride would be the slowest to allow for people to get off and on safely. The middle section is the only part that would be up to full speed. This way, you get all of the benefits with none of the drawbacks. Plus, even if safety did take a hit, it would simply make Stuy more of a meritocracy. The SHSAT might select the best test takers, but these escalators would separate the winners from the rabble. It’s time for the science kids to practice what they preach and embrace Darwinism.

“Would it even work in the first place?” a dimwitted freshman asked. Wouldn’t it? My father was an escalator engineer. My father’s father was a pioneer in the industry. Escalators can already change speed; the only thing standing between us and the escalator of the future is software. Stuyvesant is filled with the city’s best and brightest students, surely we can figure it out. Why do they have the sophomores taking computer science if not to apply it in the real world? This project.py is like building a high-speed rail. It may be expensive at the start and difficult to make work, but the benefits it would pass onto the users would far outweigh those costs in just a few short years.

Even those whom I was able to convince had their doubts. 

When I asked the AP Escalator Studies teacher, Dr. Moov Ingsteres, he pointed out that this would “barely help the faculty or the students.” At face value, I told him, he is correct; it only saves a few seconds. However, he and other readers need to consider the cascading effect it would have on total travel time. Take this example: running a subway 10 percent slower might only cause an increase of a few minutes, but it would slow down every single train behind it as well. The opposite is true here. Speeding up the escalators would mean that there would no longer be congestion around the bases because people would simply be transported faster, making the process much smoother. In addition, we could essentially double the capacity of the escalator because keeping one side open for people walking up is completely unnecessary. Those people could simply click the button and get sent up faster than they could ever run.

Finally, I thought it would be unwise of me to not consult the escalator technicians in our school. When I described my plan to them, they all looked at me, horrified. 

“This would make escalators fail more often,” they complained, staring blankly at me, no doubt with PTSD from the constant failures of our current escalators. This is a reasonable (reasonably deluded) concern as well. There are several considerations to make. First of all, this project gathers funding for an overhaul of the system with stronger parts and new AI-powered software integration. Second, the AI dynamically scaling up and down speed would extend the lifespan of these parts because the escalator would only be sped up when people are using it. If there’s nobody on the escalator, it could stop completely until it detects somebody getting on. And it logically follows that an escalator that is not moving breaks less often than one that is moving. Furthermore, the massive increases in speed from this system would mean that, supposing one escalator was down for repairs, it would be completely feasible to walk up or down one floor to take the escalator from there. 

Stuyvesant is an internationally renowned school. We are the shining city on the hill. It is our duty to build a great escalator system up to our hill so that the world can follow in our footsteps. This could just be the beginning of an era of AI-powered escalation across the globe. Modern problems don’t require modern solutions; they require solutions from the future.