The way you've been riding escalators is all wrong

We've all been there, racing up the escalators so your boss doesn't yell at you for being late to work for the third time this week.

Turns out, if we all just stayed put and rode the escalator two by two, it would be far more efficient, according to a New York Times report.

An experiment conducted at the London Underground's Holborn Station in 2016 found that the left side, the walking side, actually had a lot of space that was going to waste on elevators more than 60 feet tall.

Meaning more people were stranded at the bottom waiting for their turn to get on.

They found that having people ride up to the top standing side by side cut down congestion by around 30 percent.

A consulting group in London called Cap-Gemini also tried two scenarios, one with 40 percent walking, citing data from the Guardian, and one where everybody stood.

In the second scenario, would-be walkers lost 13 seconds, but stalwart standers saved well over a minute.

Of course, it's also safer and people are less likely to fall if they're not trying to squeeze past one another.

However, trying to get everyone to stand still on an escalator is probably a tough sell. We'll just have to keep doing what we're doing now stuck with the bittersweet knowledge that, in an alternate universe, things could be better.

Or you could always just take the stairs.

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