Accessibility Impaired: Outages Prevent Access for Vulnerable Riders

The recent notice of a temporarily out of service elevator at the NJ Transit train station highlights the importance of proactive maintenance for public transportation infrastructure. While brief outages are inevitable, prolonged issues can severely impact accessibility, cause congestion, and frustrate customers.

Increased Strain: Domino Effect on Other Assets

When a very busy elevator goes out of service, it often puts significant strain on the other elevators at the facility. Now the elevator for track 7&8 will have double the traffic it had previously. This significantly increases the odds that the elevator for track 7&8 will have a shutdown of its own. The increased traffic can cause overheating shutdowns and overcapacity shutdowns. In addition, since the elevator for track 7&8 is doing double duty, there is no chance a mechanic can ever take it out of service for maintenance.

Leveraging Data: How AuditMate Prevents Failures

When a key station component like an elevator goes out of service, vulnerable populations such as the elderly and disabled are unable to access platforms and trains. This not only inconveniences these customers, but can also lead to overcrowding in other station areas as travelers reroute. For a transit hub like NJ Transit that served over 90 million riders in 2019, even small changes in flow can cause major congestion.

For critical facilities like this, it is important to use data to determine how many maintenance hours are required to achieve the desired number of callouts. Once this is identified, AuditMate can create a custom contract to ensure the elevators are getting the correct maintenance tasks, frequencies, and durations to ensure the elevators are performing properly.

AuditMate’s elevator auditing software centralizes asset data and maintenance records across all equipment and locations. Detailed upkeep logs and IoT sensor data provide complete visibility into asset health. When failure risk spikes on a particular asset, automatic alerts notify technicians to intervene before an outage occurs.

Reputation and Reliability: Customers Expect Consistency

In addition to accessibility and congestion issues, outages reflect poorly on the transit agency’s reputation. Customers expect reliable service, and failures undermine public confidence. A recent study estimated the total cost of elevator and escalator outages in transit systems to exceed $150 million annually when factoring lost revenue, repair costs, and increased congestion.

Asset Management: The Role of Preventative Maintenance

To minimize outages, preventative maintenance and timely inspection of key infrastructure components are critical. This requires detailed asset management and maintenance workflows to ensure replacement parts, technicians, and other resources are available the moment they are needed. Here is where advanced technologies like AuditMate can assist transit agencies.

Leveraging Data: How AuditMate Prevents Failures

AuditMate’s elevator auditing software centralizes asset data and maintenance records across all equipment and locations. Detailed upkeep logs and IoT sensor data provide complete visibility into asset health. When failure risk spikes on a particular asset, automatic alerts notify technicians to intervene before an outage occurs. All documentation and parts inventories are digitized for more efficient maintenance planning and execution.

This type of proactive asset maintenance enabled by AuditMate would help NJ Transit stay ahead of equipment issues and ensure critical infrastructure like station elevators remain fully operational. With robust auditing and preventative maintenance, transit agencies can dramatically minimize disruptions. This leads to superior accessibility, flow, and customer experience – key pillars for public transportation in vibrant communities. By leveraging technology to optimize asset maintenance, agencies like NJ Transit can keep citizens moving safely and smoothly.

Frequently Asked Questions | AuditMate

FAQs

Q: What are the financial impacts of an outage?

A: Studies estimate elevator/escalator outages cost transit agencies over $150 million annually when factoring in lost revenue, extra repair costs, and increased congestion. Frequent outages also undermine public confidence in the agency.

Q: Could this outage have been prevented proactively?

A: Most outages can be minimized with detailed preventative maintenance and proactive inspections. This allows potential issues to be caught early before causing a major failure. Technology like AuditMate helps enable this.

Q: How can AuditMate’s solutions help prevent outages?

A: By centralizing asset maintenance data and providing real-time equipment health alerts, AuditMate gives full visibility into potential issues. This allows for scheduled maintenance and timely repairs to avoid failures.

Q: How else can AuditMate improve elevator/escalator management?

A: AuditMate digitizes all asset documentation, maintenance records, and parts inventories for streamlined workflows. It also simplifies vendor compliance monitoring. This optimizes the entire asset management process.

Q: How does an elevator outage impact other assets?

A: When one elevator goes down, the others experience more traffic and strain, increasing the likelihood of overheating, overcapacity and general wear-and-tear issues. AuditMate helps avoid this domino effect.

Q: Is AuditMate’s platform designed specifically for transit agencies?

A: Yes, AuditMate is purpose-built for large-scale elevator/escalator management across transit hubs, airports, malls and other large venues. The insights improve uptime and customer experience.