We give quantitative results about the abundance of escaping orbits in a family of exact twist maps preserving Lebesgue measure on the cylinder T × R; geometrical features of maps of this family are quite similar to those of the well-known Chirikov-Taylor standard map, and in fact we believe that the techniques presented in this work can be further improved and eventually applied to studying ergodic properties of the standard map itself.

We state conditions which assure that escaping orbits exist and form a full Hausdorff dimension set. Moreover, under stronger conditions we can prove that such orbits are not charged by the invariant measure. We also obtain prove that, generically, the system presents elliptic islands at arbitrarily high values of the action variable and provide estimates for their total measure.