You must have encountered this situation, if your hands have been leaning on the rubber handrail when to ride an escalator, it will be slowly pulled forward by the handrail, so that you have to retract your hands in the middle of the journey.
 

Why is the speed of the escalator handrails always faster than steps? Is it because of inaccurate calibration? Obviously not. Let's discuss this issue today. 

The first reason is for safety. 

The speed of the escalator handrails are slightly faster than the speed of the escalator steps. It can bring the body's center of gravity forward when getting on the escalator, and it can prevent the body from falling down due to the sudden increase of the speed under the feet.

The second important reason is that can greatly increase the service life of the escalator. 

To put it simply, the fundamental reason lies in the different ways of operation for the escalator steps and handrails. The escalator steps rely on chain transmission, while the principle of handrails operation is belt transmission. Because there is no gear on the handrail operation, the escalator handrail belts are mainly driven by friction wheel https://www.deysse.com/product/Escalator-Handrail-Friction-Wheel-Size-440*250*36mm-GS01304001-502.html, which makes the rubber on the outer side of the driving wheel easy to wear. According to data, the speed of the rubber drive wheel will slow down by 1% for every 3mm of wear. It means that under the same driving force, if the rubber drive wheels and gears are the same size, the speed of the escalator handrail will be slower.

As can be seen from the previous point, we would rather make the handrail faster. Therefore, in order to correct these errors, the rubber drive wheel will be set to the size of the handrail + 2% of the transmission speed, leaving room for loss and slippage.

When the escalator runs, the gears of the steps and the rubber wheels of the handrails rotate at the same time, and the rubber drive wheels with a larger diameter will drive the handrails faster.

In this way, as long as they are properly maintained, the service life of escalator handrails can be more than doubled.