Now officially taking rides: an over-a-half-mile long escalator that stretches ever upward in a mountainous city in China’s Chongqing municipality.
Called the “Goddess” escalator, its endeavors towards a suitably heavenly domain. The absurd architectural feat cuts through the center of the city in Wushan, starting from the bottom of a steep bank and rising straight into the sky, which it almost seems to touch; footage of the marvel, while impressive, struggles to capture its sheer scale.
End to end, it takes almost 21 minutes to ascend, the Financial Times reports; it’s almost certainly the world’s largest of its kind.
“As far as I know, there are no similar projects nationwide, either exceeding or equal to ours, either under construction or already started,” Huang Wei, head of the design team for the project and an engineer at China Railway Eryuan Engineering Group, told the FT. “It’s the first of its kind.”
The Goddess escalator isn’t quite an unbroken chain of slow-rolling platforms: it comprises some two dozen individual escalators and lifts, but all part of one system and platform. The escalator’s actual escalating stairways were produced by the Swiss company Schindler, and manufactured in a factory in the north of Shanghai. The Chinese arm of the company has provided some 1,400 escalators to the Chongqing metro system.
It already seems to be a hit, in a city already home to the iconic Crown escalator built in the 1990s. According to the reporting, some 9,000 people in Wushan use the Goddess escalator every day, paying roughly $0.43 for every hour of use in one direction. 450,000 people used it during the Spring Festival last month, an official said.
44-year old Xie Hongmin, who was visiting from a nearby rural settlement, said hoped his own town would install something like the escalator.
“Walking is quite tiring,” he told the FT.
It’s also a boon to the city’s many bangbang men, porters who lug around goods on bamboo poles and ropes, or carry bulky cardboard boxes on their back.
“In the 1990s, there were probably tens of thousands of porters in Yuzhong district alone,” 60-year-old Ran Guanghui told the FT, as he used the escalator system to carry bags of bras into a nearby mall. “There weren’t elevators before, which was quite inconvenient,” he added.
More on Chinese infrastructure: China Working On Levitating Train That Could Get You From New York to Chicago in Two Hours
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