In fact, after watching the refuse pile up for a few weeks after the plaza escalator broke, I took a picture and sent it to a member of the BART board.

"As a frequent patron of 16th Street BART, I recognize there are huge challenges to maintain a clean and orderly environment at the station," I wrote. "But the conditions there often seem to bespeak outright neglect. ... I guess the underlying questions after saying all that are: What does BART have to do to improve conditions at the station? And what will it take to prompt BART to take that action?"

Diary of Disrepair BART spokeswoman Alicia Trost provided this account of the mechanical problems that have beset the 16th/Mission station's Burger King Plaza (or east side) escalator since last December: The east side unit went out of service on 12/23/15 for a water intrusion issue that caused an electrical short.

The sump pump was ordered and replaced. The crew started troubleshooting the electrical short and while troubleshooting they identified the escalator was running erratically with excessive play in the drive system.

After further troubleshooting, the cause for the excessive play was a result of a bull gear pillar block failure (pillar blocks are the components that mount the bull gear to the truss of the escalator).

Immediately, material needed to make such a heavy repair was assessed and a great deal of research went into ordering this material due to equipment obsolescence. The pillar blocks need to be specially fabricated, as well as the bearings, race, seals and end caps. (This took 10 weeks to receive material.)

Once material was received, our crews went right to work dismantling the upper end of the escalator to gain access and replace the faulty components.

The escalator was returned to service on 5/9/16 and unfortunately, did not have enough run in time for proper calibration following the heavy repair.

On 5/10/16 the Unit was removed from service to make the necessary adjustments and indexing needed after such a large repair and major component replacement.

After a thorough recalibration and all indexing was accomplished, on 5/23/16 the escalator was returned to service.

I didn't hear back from the board member. But when I was exiting the station about three hours after sending the note, a cleanup crew was on the scene. So maybe the board member actually read the message.

But that email clearly didn't have any impact on the escalator, which has remained frozen in place week after week. What's been ailing it?

The constant accumulation of refuse probably doesn't help. And the conditions certainly don't make life any easier for the technicians brought in to work on the equipment. Earlier this week, San Francisco's KPIX aired a report on BART worker overtime. KPIX says it asked BART spokeswoman Alicia Trost why the agency didn't hire more escalator technicians, for instance, instead of paying huge amounts of overtime.

"We are actually having a hard time recruiting," Trost is quoted as saying. "The conditions aren’t very glamorous, working 24 hours a day on our stinky old escalators. We don’t have a lot of people chomping at the bits for that.”

The age of the escalators is an issue, too. The systems at 16th and Mission and three other stations (24th/Mission, Montgomery and Embarcadero) were manufactured by a German outfit named Orenstein and Koppel. Shortly after selling the escalators to BART, the firm went belly up. So now BART is stuck trying to find parts for escalators that are nearly 20 years old and whose manufacturer is no longer in business.

But it's possible to muddle through, and that's what BART is doing. Last month, it awarded a $2.9 million contract for limited part replacement and renovation of the escalators at the four stations served by O&K systems.

Trost provided a detailed account of the troubles afflicting the Burger King Plaza escalator, starting last December (see box above). The real show-stopper was something called a "bull gear pillar block failure." The bull gear is the main gear moving the stairs; the pillar block connects the bull gear to the truss, or escalator framework. (Here's an interactive schematic that purports to show how all this stuff works in the ideal, non-16th Street world.)

After diagnosing the problem, BART had to wait for months while parts were fabricated. Earlier this week, everything was installed and the escalator was running again.

So for now, you can ride the stairs at Burger King Plaza. The escalator across the way, at the southwest plaza, is awaiting installation of a new handrail. That work is supposed to be done the first week of June.