Stairs are harder to walk, and higher risk of injury than slopes (imagine falling from stairs versus falling from slope).
So why aren’t slopes used more commonly in buildings?
Even stairs-shaped escalators are more common than slope-shaped escalators.
**Edit:** By “slopes”, I mean “ramps”. Pardon my English.
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It wasn’t till the late 70s that public buildings in the US had to provide ramps for wheelchair access. basically nobody thought of it before, elderly weren’t that common before social security and modern healthcare.
Ramps take up too much space than stairs.
One reason is walking down.
Walking down stairs is way more comfortable than a ramp. A ramp forces you to land each step on the heel instead of the toe. Toe is out damper for our back. Steps that land on heel are heavier on knees and back and can cause pain, tiredness, and damage long term.
Safety: while falling down a stair is scary, it actually tend to happen with one foot slipping and the other jamming on a step, which makes you painfully fall on your legs and bum, not nice, but pain apart, it’s unlikely to kill you. Slipping down a ramp on the other hand is likely to make both foot slide downhill and you can land on your head, killing you. Another very likely event is that you will try to stop the fall with your hand resulting in a broken wrist.
-source: enough walking on snowy, icy, and muddy mountain trails, and mountain villages footpaths.
Imagine a typical staircase in a house. Now imagine how steep that would need to be if it was a slope instead. Virtually unclimbable for most people. To create an acceptable gradient slope would require a much more space. The same goes for any other building.
To build a ramp at a safe and legal angle it would take up about 10 times the area to go up the same distance.
Safe stairs are much steeper than safe slopes. The steepest safe stair for the general public is 1:1.6, while a safe ramp is 1:12. This means that using ramps to go up results in lots of going sideways. This example[This Example](https://s0.geograph.org.uk/geophotos/04/70/83/4708391_2f004e0b_original.jpg) shows how stairs take you straight to the platform, while the ramp has to zig-zag and go a lot further. Going up 1 storey(4.3m) would require you to walk 6.9m horizontally on stairs, or 51.6m horizontally on ramps.
A gentle ramp with a handrail is the gold standard in universally accessible design. Anyone with wheels cannot use stairs, and so either ramps or lifts must be provided for them. However if the ramp is hundreds of metres long, then it is no longer universally accessible. There are lots of less abled people who can’t walk that far, and so would actually be much better served by an escalator, stairs, or a lift.
A lift is the most universally accessible way to go up or down, but they are expensive, prone to breaking down, and not safe during power cuts or fires, so for small height changes ramps are better.
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