If you commute through BART's Embarcadero station with any regularity, you've developed calves of steel — not by choice, but because at any given moment, at least one escalator is out of service, draped in caution tape like a crime scene nobody's investigating.

It's become such a reliable feature of the San Francisco experience that it barely registers anymore. Tourists look confused. Commuters don't even glance up. The "Escalator Out of Service" sign at Embarcadero is as permanent as the fog.

To be fair, there's a real explanation here, and it's not entirely about incompetence. BART's underground escalators at Embarcadero are genuinely end-of-life machines. The original manufacturer went out of business decades ago, meaning replacement parts simply don't exist. What BART is doing now — in theory — is full replacements, not repairs. And as one local pointed out, "They can't just lower them in there with a crane. They have to rebuild the supports for the new escalator type and then assemble the new escalator on those new supports from scratch on-site." That process takes years per escalator.

Okay, fine. But here's the thing: how did we get to the point where critical transit infrastructure was allowed to age into obsolescence with no succession plan? The manufacturer didn't disappear overnight. These escalators didn't spontaneously decide to retire. This is what happens when a public agency spends decades deferring maintenance and hoping the problem solves itself.

As one SF resident quipped, channeling the late Mitch Hedberg: "An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs. Sorry for the convenience."

Funny — but it undersells the problem. Broken escalators aren't just an inconvenience. They're an accessibility nightmare for elderly riders, parents with strollers, and anyone with a disability. "Temporarily stairs" isn't an option for everyone.

Major cities around the world manage escalator systems serving ten times the ridership without this level of chronic failure. The difference isn't engineering — it's prioritization and planning. BART has had decades to get ahead of this. Instead, commuters are climbing stairs in 2025 because nobody in the bureaucracy thought to plan for equipment that wouldn't last forever.

The escalators will eventually get replaced. But the institutional mindset that let them decay? That's the thing that really needs an overhaul.