Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT) is backing a national campaign to end the long-standing practice of standing on one side of an escalator and leaving the other side open for walking. The "Stand on Both Sides" initiative aims to change deeply ingrained commuter behavior that varies by region within Japan itself: in Tokyo, riders stand on the left and walk on the right, while in Osaka the convention is reversed. The campaign argues that escalator walking is both a safety hazard and an inefficient use of capacity, and it has the data to support that claim.
Nagoya has emerged as the most aggressive city in implementing the policy. On October 1, 2023, the city enacted an official ordinance encouraging riders to stand on both sides of escalators. The ordinance does not carry fines, but it created the legal framework for a remarkably creative enforcement mechanism: the "Stop and Stand Squad." These are teams of three paid workers who ride escalators during peak hours, deliberately standing on the right side to physically block the walking lane. Team leaders earn 16,000 yen per day (approximately $110), while team members earn 6,500 yen per shift (approximately $45). The squads wear large yellow hand-shaped backpacks to make their presence unmistakable. They work six-hour shifts, riding the same escalators repeatedly to normalize the behavior they are trying to promote.
The timing of Nagoya's escalation is not accidental. The city will host the 2026 Asian Games from September 19 through October 4, and local authorities want the stand-on-both-sides norm established well before hundreds of thousands of international visitors arrive. The campaign is as much about managing crowd flow at transit hubs and venues during a major international event as it is about long-term behavioral change. For a city preparing to move massive volumes of people through its stations and event facilities, escalator throughput is a real operational concern.
The operational case for standing on both sides is backed by one of the most cited experiments in the escalator world. In November and December 2015, Transport for London ran a trial at Holborn station on the Piccadilly line, one of the deepest stations on the network with a 24-meter escalator rise. During the trial, certain escalators were designated standing-only during the morning peak from 08:30 to 09:30. The results were striking: standing-only escalators carried 3,250 people per hour compared to 2,500 under the conventional walk-left-stand-right arrangement. That is a 30 percent increase in throughput. At maximum flow, the standing configuration moved 141 people per minute versus 115 per minute with a walking lane. The math is straightforward: when half the steps are empty because people leave a walking lane, the escalator moves fewer people per hour than when every step is occupied.
For the vertical transportation industry, Japan's campaign is worth tracking because it represents a shift in how governments think about escalator operations. Escalator manufacturers design equipment to be ridden, not walked on. Walking subjects steps, combs, and handrails to asymmetric loading and lateral forces they are not optimized for, contributing to accelerated wear on one side. Every escalator mechanic who has worked on high-traffic transit units has seen the differential wear pattern on the standing side versus the walking side. If the stand-on-both-sides norm gains traction globally, it could reduce certain maintenance demands while also requiring updated signage, ADA and accessibility considerations for riders who cannot stand on both sides, and potentially changes to escalator design parameters for new installations in transit environments. Japan's experiment is the most visible test case yet for whether regulatory and cultural intervention can actually change how people use escalators.