I don't know if this is an up-and-coming trendy field, but they do some quirky-cool things with escalators over here. In Hong Kong, there are the outdoor commuting escalators, and some half-spiral escalators in at least one mall (I know, San Francisco also has the latter). Other features I've seen in a few places (Beijing, Singapore, possibly here in Shanghai) tie into a question my friend Philip asked a while back -- the most common are energy-saving escalators that shut off when not in use, and activate when someone approaches. Sometimes these are even two-way escalators -- the same escalator will go up or down, depending on the direction of approach (that one was obviously not a particularly heavily-used escalator, and although I wanted to do a trial run to see what happened when two people walked up on opposite ends simultaneously, it didn't happen. Hopefully it's programmed for that eventuality so that it doesn't blow a schizophrenic fuse). Anyway, I think these are all really neat, because I am a nerd.
This is my latest escalator find -- an escalator with a landing! I've decided to name it the "double hill" escalator, after a similarly shaped hill we used to sled down at my old high school. This one is at a new downtown subway stop. It starts out normally, then flattens for the equivalent of about five stairs, then picks back up. The person I was riding with didn't even notice the change until I pointed it out.
Nifty.
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