School portraits / The school day, measured vertically
Stuyvesant has timed the stairs
The route to class became a research question. The backpack came along as supporting evidence.
At Stuyvesant, Olivia Zheng and Uma Sukhu timed the stairs against the escalators. Their 2022–23 Spectator investigation included a roughly twelve-pound backpack and time to catch their breath. I appreciate research that leaves room for needing a minute.
You can see the appeal. A school timetable looks so peaceful on paper. One subject follows another in a neat little box. The paper is not obliged to get its body from one box to the next. It has never had to reconsider a decision halfway up.
In a 2021 report about escalator replacements, student Maya Brosnick described an earlier stretch of her schedule: tenth floor to third, then ninth, then first. She remembered the extra stair travel with understandable irritation. The new escalators were something she was looking forward to.
Read those floor numbers aloud and the day starts to sound like somebody testing the buttons on an elevator. Only there is homework in the bag. Parents asking how classes went may need a separate question about the journey between them.
The later timing experiment counted the hallway walk between escalators. Climbing stairs took nineteen seconds for the first flight, thirty-three by the seventh. The stairs still won in their trial, with caveats about different bodies, loads and crowds.
That final qualification matters to anyone who has watched a teenager carry a bag that appears to contain a second teenager. A result can be perfectly sound without making the faster option the more tempting one. Sometimes your preferred method of going up is to stand still and let the building participate.
There is a lot to like about taking an irritation seriously enough to investigate it. I would happily read more reporting that began with something its authors actually had to put up with.
I would offer the stair investigators my admiration from the escalator. Their evidence is persuasive. My commitment to arriving slightly less winded is, regrettably, also quite strong.