Escalator lawsuits/de facto ban?

In the 1930's, there was at least one lawsuit in the USA after someone got heart on an escalator in the 1930's. What would the effects be, if insurance costs and/pr laws made escalators de facto banned in the USA, or even in some major cities like Boston and New York? Not major game changers, but I could see that hurting downtowns, since multi-level stores will have a built-in limit on the flow of customers to upper levels.

Not something I'm planning on running with, since The Masquerade is consuming all my writing time, but something that someone might find fun to run with, as either a POD or a feature of a timeline with an earlier POD.
 
Getting something banned, or more likely having something disappear from the market due to lawsuits/tort actions is dependent on several things. Is there a real cause and effect going on here, is the product inherently dangerous (think Thalidomide). How useful is the product, an escalator is indeed a very useful device 9and I would bet you'll get more heart attacks from the "wrong" folks walking up stairs than riding an escalator). Finally, is the product/device going to be profitable enough so that the cost of even defending lawsuits you win exceeds what it is worth.

The US legal system has a few peculiarities. One is the contingency fee, where the lawyer gets a percentage of the award if they win (plus expenses) nothing if they lose. Also it is almost impossible for the winning side to recover expenses from the loser - you have to prove the suit was patently frivolous and the bar for this is quite high. These are different from most countries.

Because the cost of initiating a suit is so low (just the filing cost), it is possible to have so many suits that even if you win all of them the costs are so high you pull the product because the profit doesn't cover your legal costs, let alone if just one multimillion dollar suit succeeds. I've seen this happen...
 
It doesn't even have to be banned, just essentially uninsurable, and it won't be used in the USA. I just thought that their non-existence could lead to some interesting spin-off's. At the same time, they might be common in Canada and Europe.
Imagine trying to build decently deep subways without escalators, or department stores where the elevators were the only option. You'd need LOTS of big elevators.
 
Given the famous Kinder Surprise Egg ban, it's surprisingly plausible. Escalators cause a number of deaths every year (nowadays mostly in China due to lax safety regulations, but it's a global problem), and many more injuries. They also sometimes destroy clothing and shoes. All you need is the right people finding the right lawyers to get some serious litigation going in an era before the standards for escalator-related lawsuits are set. While unlikely to be totally banned (they are indeed useful), operating an escalator would be extremely expensive and few businesses would go for it. But those few businesses would be the most successful ones, and would buy up smaller ones/be faster to expand.

One way of helping things out is decoupling the escalator industry from the elevator industry, since it seems they're pretty much the same. Don't get the Otis Elevator Company involved in escalators, which would take a pre-1900 POD.
 
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