The Montgomery County Council is looking at ways to prevent escalator breakdowns at the Bethesda Metro station.
On Friday, all the escalators at the Bethesda station were out of service the same time, and the County Council's transportation subcommittee is holding a hearing Tuesday night to talk about how to avoid similar incidents in the future.
The discussion will include Metro officials and is expected to cover plans to replace the escalators and to build a new entrance to the station on Elm Street. The meeting will be at 7:30 p.m. at the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Regional Service Center
Metro has been dealing with numerous escalator outages in recent years as equipment ages. As of Tuesday morning, about 20 percent of the system's escalators were out of service for scheduled or unscheduled maintenance. And just in time for the council meeting, power went out at Bethesda again Tuesday morning, knocking out escalator service for more than an hour just after the morning rush.
