Lovin' their elevator: why Germans are loopy about paternosters | Hacker News Reader

Lovin' their elevator: why Germans are loopy about paternosters

theguardian.com

61 pointsdthal56 comments

It seems like there should be a way to build these in a safe way. For example, angling the ceiling of the compartment as well as where the ceiling of the building meets the compartment should offer quite a lot more safety:

http://i.imgur.com/CJbf1oq.png

You could also imagine 'sprung' walls between the compartments that prevent limbs/feet from getting squashed.

As for accessibility for disabled persons, I see no reason why a paternoster can't be switched to 'elevator mode'. You can hit a button on the wall that will stop the system when the next compartment reaches your floor, get inside with your wheelchair/baby carriage/grandpa, and push a button inside the compartment before the floor you want to get off at to do the same.

Indeed! Also, they should probably find a solution for that problem where little children get smashed like a not-so-lucky group of rebels in a trash compactor when the paternoster goes over the top.

That problem has been solved (look at the animation on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster). I guess it had been solved before the first paternoster got installed. If so, it never was a real problem.

I'm slightly disappointed it doesn't flip over :)

That'll teach to to disobey the signs!

You could have deduced that by observing that you never find footprints on the ceilings of the cars, or that the left and right walls of cars do not get switched.

From the first paragraph of the article:

"We’re not supposed to do the full circuit," he said. "But that’s the best way to feel like you’re on a ferris wheel or a gondola."

You can do a full circuit with no problem.

You could also have electrical switches. Ordinary lifts already have a risk of this and already protect against it electrically. Next time you're in a lift, try pulling the doors open while it's moving. In my experience, you can fairly easily open them and the car comes to a sudden stop before you have a chance to poke your leg out and get it chopped off.

There really aren't many of them here in Germany. Funnily, the only one I ever used was in the UK, in Attenborough Tower at the University of Leicester. Never seen one in Germany, but here's a (probably incomplete) list of known paternosters worldwide: http://www.flemming-hamburg.de/patlist.htm

I used to ride one at the University of Leeds in the 1980s. It served a five floor lecture theater known for its brutalist 1960s architecture [1].

I rode it over the top on several occasions - the car went up one side, slid horizontally and then came down again. It was a good way to queue jump but allegedly could cause the whole system to jam, in which case the people caught in the middle would be carpeted. It's now been decommissioned, apparently.

[1] http://www.teachingspace.leeds.ac.uk/building_details.asp?ID...

I've been in several of them in Bremen. Cool thing is that they are (mostly) in public buildings.

"Haus des Reichs (Senator für Finanzen, Finanzämter)", is basically the tax office.

You can walk in and ride up to the canteen and eat (on the top floor). It is also available to be used by the public (though not everyone knows that and assume that it is only for staff).

Here is another list: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Paternosteraufz%C3%B...

The article misses important points about the reason for the outcry on the proposed law. Many people here are fed up with the overregulating nanny state with more and more unnecessary rules imposed by inept control freaks like Andrea Nahles. She also seems to have difficulties with judging the impact of her ideas. There are now way too many similar the her in today's politics (throughout most of the political parties in Germany).

How do people in wheel chairs and crutches reach different floors? If there is a handicapped or moving elevator as well, and if there is an auto-stop mechanism if someone's foot is stuck between lift and ceiling, then I see no reason why these shouldn't be in every office building or condo. They are clearly way more time efficient.

I don't think they're clearly more efficient. For a tall enough building, or low enough traffic, what you save in waiting time, you'd lose in the slower travelling speed.

Well, if I had access to Windows I could quickly tell you the bounds of where it is more efficient by using this: http://www.ezstrobe.com/ and assuming different types of arrivals (stochastic, etc). But I don't have Windows and I just learned one of my favorite professors died (it's listed on the website) so now I'm sad.

Maybe later I'll port to linux.

It's easy to fall some distance when the next lift is below your level.

> rules imposed by inept control freaks like Andrea Nahles

Thank god we have the CSU to counter balance these socialist control freaks and their utterly ridiculous ideas, right?

There is not much a difference to me whether she want to have mandatory classes on Paternoster use, the Greens want to impose a veggie day a week or the CSU wants to have a data retention law to allow to sniff in our digital life. I do not want any of this. For the parties missing in this list above I am sure I can find for almost all of them a fitting example to add them. To me this seems to be a more general issue.

Haha, you mean the CSU which advertises data retention whenever a car tire pops? If I can think of one control freak party, its the one that wants tighter control over refugees. Not that anything hurts the clean image of the typical bavarian town.

I used one in the Arts Tower of Sheffield University where I studied. It was fun, but felt slow. There were also 2 (3?) conventional elevators that seemed like the best bet when doing more than 5 floors.

It's still functional.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arts_Tower

Yeah, I've been on that one to and was rather unimpressed. One show did a segment about it a year or so ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAjYAfb_HPk

Search for 'klamrisk' to find a rather... infamous warning sign showing what not to do in one of these. That sign also turned into somewhat of a minor meme amongst the demoscene community several years ago (it even turned into a game: http://www.linusakesson.net/games/klamrisk/index.php ).

I've seen it mentioned here and there that one isn't supposed to ride it all the way around (that is, on the horizontal sections), but the reason escapes me. If you stay inside the cabin, what exactly can go wrong? (serious question) Getting stuck doesn't seem logical, why would the probability of the paternoster stopping increase when there is a (modest) load on the horizontal sections?

The reason is that the cabins are being cleaned on the bottom and top of the loop - there's a mesh of blades entering the cabin making sure there's nothing left on, or inside the walls and then the remnants of whatever it was that was not supposed to be there are dropped through an open hole in the floor to the recycling bin (waste from paternosters is obviously recycled, this is Germany we're talking about).

;).

More seriously though, I guess it's not that you can't, only that you shouldn't, because there's always a shorter route to your destination that doesn't involve looping.

If you look at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paternoster_animated... presumably, as the open-fronted compartments pass over the top of the mechanism, the red drive chain is exposed to people in the cabin. If you watch the video in the guardian article labelled "the loop: from the top" you see an exposed chain that looks easily strong enough to take off a few fingers without stopping.

You could probably come up with an overlapping arrangement of guards, of course. And presumably anyone riding one of these things already knows not to put their limbs into trap points - I couldn't say if the danger of trapping at the top is any greater than the danger of trapping at one of the floors.

Rescue might also be difficult if there's a power cut or breakdown.

Some people wrongfully believed the elevator cabin was fixed to the chain. So at the top or bottom the cabin would turn upsidedown, including the passenger, rather than moving horizontally.

Sadly they are slowly disappearing. Mainly because of safety reasons, they are considered dangerous.

Security is not the main issue. The main issue is accessibility. A disabled person or a person with a baby carriage cannot use them. It becomes a security issue when they do.

100 years ago, accessibility was not an issue.

It isn't much different than an escalator. Escalators are fairly unsafe and not very accessible with children and the elderly the most common victims in terms of injury and death. Quite a few people die every year on escalator's from tripping, falling and other things.

True. Maybe the escalator industry has a bigger lobby. ;)

Accessibility is itself something can can be and is lobbied for. Compared with many smaller interests, like specific kinds of business, this lobby may even be considered powerful.

I often see them beside elevators, so accessibility is not always the problem.

That is true. But they can be out of order or simply around a corner. We are sometimes suffering from tunnel vision or overestimate our abilities and realize mistakes too late.

100 years later, security still is an issue.

As fun as they seem to be, they definitely sound dangerous, especially with kids around.

I wonder if they couldn't be retrofitted with some safety device, like sensors stopping the motion if some object crosses the door when the elevator is above a certain height, respective to the floor.

I think you mean safety.

Nobody is going to compromise those things any time soon.

Yes, I meant safety :) Thanks

Just out of curiosity. I have never ridden one of those but what can actually go wrong? From what I can see:

* You can jump in too late, thus falling an unexpected height and break your ankles.

* You take too long getting in thus getting a garment/arm/leg stuck between the ceiling of the paternoster and the floor.

Am I correct? Or am I missing something?

The one I used to use at Heathrow had hinged flaps as the flooring at the entrance so that if you caught a foot over the edge it would lift up with your foot ameliorating that second risk. I think the main danger of serious injury (rather than a bruise or sprain) was people carrying overlarge objects into the paternoster. I was in the building when one snapped a ladder and it was pretty noisy.

The overall risk is low but probably higher than that of a conventional lift although paternosters should be far more efficient.

Uneven floor means increased risk of trips and falls. Considerable effort is spent on reducing falls because they're a cause of a lot of avoidable injury.

There have been some deaths caused by paternosters. The number (5 between 1970 and 1993) is tiny, but there aren't that many paternosters.

A man died in 2012 when he fell into the shaft.

We probably shouldn't be installing more paternosters unlesss we come up with safer designs. I don't think we should be closing the existing examples.

If we're worried about trips and falls, staircases should be banned. Yet it's a recent "healthy living" and "sustainability" trend at workplaces to encourage people to take the stairs (gives you a bit of exercise and also saves electricity). I wonder if these benefits have ever been compared to the increase in worker-compensation injury claims from stairway falls.

With a bare bones designe, if you are unlucky, your arm/leg won't get stuck, but get crushed or detached (violently)

Step out a tad too late while going down and trip on the unexpected step up you have to make, and a few seconds later, the top of the box may break your ankle. The falling _will_ happen, in particular to elderly with weaker bones, so you will have to come up with a solution that stops the device _fast_ if that happens. At the same time, for reliability, the device shouldn't come to a stop if someone heavy steps or jumps into a box.

I can't think of much more that could happen. My opinion is: if you are a human equipped with a brain (which functions normally) there is not much risk using an paternoster.

I can assure you that this is a very dangerous assumption. In theory, almost all workplace safety regulations could be replaced by a "Just put up a 'don't be an idiot'" sign. But then we would have a lot of unnecessary deaths and horrible accidents.

The are many reasons for this, but it mostly comes down to people being distracted and simple statistics - given enough time, even a small risk will lead to accidents.

I agree partially. But labelling a coffee cup with a notice that it is hot should not be necessary.

In the same way that labeling a guillotine with a notice that it could cut your fingers off should not be necessary? In both cases they seem safe because the people using them use them every day and are familiar with the risks. Unfortunately, what happens is every now and then an experienced factory worker cuts his fingers off in the same guillotine he's been operating for decades, or an old lady needs skin grafts on her legs after spilling a cup of hot coffee just like she's been drinking for decades.

I'm not following you. Your examples are of the inherent risk in the activity or device - a person drinks coffee regularly, and then burns herself after drinking safely for years - this is just a risk of a hot drink, it could happen at any time. Having a sign on the item doesn't impact the risk for a regular user: the regular user knows the risks, and will ignore signs they see all the time.

Signs might protect a new user - 'this is a guillotine if you hit the button it will cut your hand off'. Is that the point your making?

Or car window stickers which are hard to remove and designed to be permanent stating the risks of driving a car. Also, the warnings printed onto the interior visors about child seats.

Any system of any kind is doomed to failure if it is designed around the requirement that humans behave infallibly at all times. Everyone is a distracted idiot some of the time.

True story: I dropped some luggage while getting onto a down escalator. It very nearly kneecapped someone who was old enough to be badly injured.

We were lucky, it was a very close thing. :\ Convenience vs. acceptable risk, with a certain amount of 'cool and rare' factor. Moving human bodies around is inherently dangerous.

Not surprising, escalators injure more than ten thousand people a year in the US alone, particularly the elderly. Moving people is dangerous, agreed, but if we gave in too quickly to the "just behave sensibly" people, our cars would still be the relative death-traps they were just thirty or so years ago. And that's just one example.

are they?

The real WTF here is "Nahles claimed she had failed to read the small print in the new law restricting the use of paternosters, saying had she done so she would not have signed off on it."

A minister with a huge office, lots of aids and access to a scientific and legal research group considers that an adequate statement? Until now I thought the main qualification for German politicians would be to never have held a normal job in real life and involvement in a party's youth organization since the age of 14 at least - I guess I have to add "substandard reading comprehension" to that list.

I was lucky to work in a building equipped with a Paternoster in Munich, Germany. We had a fancy startup office, but the Paternoster was the feature I liked most!

The article is full of this German reliability, efficient character mumbo jumbo, yet every administrative process takes forever here.

Maybe they should build more of those.

https://helixator.wordpress.com/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com