The escalators in Munich’s U-Bahn are bidirectional. Not one up, one down: just one, and it goes whichever way the first person to step on it wants to go. If someone’s riding down and you want to go up, you wait. There’s no override, no priority lane. You just stand there until it’s your turn.

I’ve started calling them democratic escalators.

It’s a small thing. But after years in Japan and London and now Munich, these moments of enforced patience have started to feel like how a country tells you what it values, in the language of everyday objects.

Years ago, I wrote a series of posts about everyday usability in Japan. Ticket gates that stay open by default, trusting you’ve paid. Queues that form in perfect silence at painted marks on a platform. Convenience stores that silently profile your age and gender at the till to optimise tomorrow’s inventory. Japan is extraordinarily well-designed for daily life, but the order comes from somewhere different. It’s observational. You watch, you mirror, you fall into line. Nobody asks whether the escalator should go up or down. The question has already been answered before you arrive.

In Britain, democracy is mostly an abstraction. You vote every few years, you complain about the government, and the rest of the time the social contract is unspoken. You cross the road when it looks safe. Nobody’s watching, and if they are, they won’t say anything.

Germany is different. Here, democracy is a practice. It’s negotiated. Something you do daily, in small, physical ways, whether you think of it that way or not. Sometimes it’s tedious.

Take the pedestrian crossing. Germans wait at red lights even when the street is empty. Coming from the UK, where people treat pedestrian signals as suggestions, this felt absurd at first. But the system only works if everyone agrees to follow it. You wait because the person next to you is also waiting, and they would give you a dirty look if you didn’t.

Or Sonntagsruhe. The Sunday quiet laws. On Sundays, you can’t mow your lawn, drill a wall, or make any noise that might disturb your neighbours. Shops are closed. The day belongs to collective rest, not individual productivity. What you’re allowed to do is bounded by everyone else’s right to quiet. A democratic negotiation written into the week itself.

Then there’s the Hausordnung, the house rules posted in every apartment building. These often include a Kehrwoche, a rotating schedule for who sweeps the staircase and courtyard. Nobody enforces it from above. Tenants manage it among themselves, sometimes with a less than subtle note on the door.

Even the workplace operates this way. Mitbestimmung, co-determination, means workers in larger companies elect representatives to the supervisory board. Decisions are slower, more consultative. Everyone gets a voice. The escalator logic, again.

The rules here are participatory. They ask something of you. They assume you’ll show up, take your turn, and respect the queue, because the whole thing falls apart if you don’t.

The bidirectional escalator is the same. A dedicated up and down would move more people faster, but everyone’s direction matters equally, and sometimes that means standing still for a moment while someone else goes first. More practical constraints probably dictated the choice (space, cost) but the result is an interesting case study in enforced social negotiation.

This has limits, obviously. Germany has its own democratic tensions, plenty of them, and recent years have made that clear. But as someone who grew up in a country where civic life mostly happens behind closed doors, there’s something striking about living somewhere it happens on the escalator, at the traffic light, in the stairwell. You get used to it. You might even start to like it.

Photo top by Jahanzeb Ahsan