New York’s Elevators Define the City (2016) | Hacker News Reader

New York’s Elevators Define the City (2016)

fivethirtyeight.com

43 pointsOsiris3029 comments

>There are only about 30 elevator and escalator deaths in this country each year. About 1,900 people die taking the stairs.

This is a great example of a useless statistic. There's no point in having it, it does nothing at best and misleads at worst.

In order for it to be useful, at the very least it should be deaths per some value that represents the relative frequency by which elevators and escalators are used. Elevators and escalators are pretty much never covered in snow or ice and it's a lot harder to fall down an escalator since you don't need to move while on it. I'm sure if you replaced every small flight of stairs in front of a building with an escalator a lot more people would die on escalators.

>Some of the outlying entries in the data set are indeed legitimate. The Barclays Center, home to the Brooklyn Nets and New York Islanders, has not one but two freight elevators that each have a capacity of 80,000 pounds (13 or so elephants).

The citation on this (http://www.meielevatorsolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/...) was a far more interesting read than the author waxing poetic about boxes that go up and down so I guess that makes up for the abuse of statistics.

Believe most of the elevator deaths happen to repair workers while servicing the machine. (I looked this up after being trapped alone without cell reception for 20 minutes in an old elevator on Wall Street last year).

Video of the Barclays elevator in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm19yMKVqOs

Amazing how you can be totally unaware of so much neat engineering going on literally beneath your feet.

I agree, the PDF about the elevators was fascinating. I've submitted it separately here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17926777

I suspect Americans travel approximately as many if not more floors in elevators than stairs, making a direct comparison more meaningful. Sure, you can slice it by trips or time, but stairs still kill a lot of people each year.

EX: NYC has 8.5 million people who probably average 50+ flights a day in elevators. People may travel up and down stairs more frequently, but few people are traveling anywhere near that far.

> NYC has 8.5 million people who probably average 50+ flights a day in elevators

This is hard to believe

NYC Average Floor Count = 38 above ground. People are going to go up ~1/2 of them on average.

If they enter and leave 1 building once per day that's ~38 floors, double again for leaving home to get to work ~= 76 floors. Many people like the homeless or shut ins average less, but someone that is doing delivery's could easily average 1,000+ floors per day.

I could see the overall average easily being 100+ floors, but 50 seems like a very safe bet.

Where did you get that average floor count stat? That sounds very high except in parts of Manhattan.

Random post online.

While it seemed high, if you have a 1 floor building, and a 10 floor building you have floors ((1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 +10) + (1)) / 11 = 5 floor average height.

Not: Average the building heights (10 + 1) / 2 = 5.5 and then cut that in half = 2.75 average floor height.

PS: Put another way a 1 story building has 1 floor of people a 100 floor building has 100 floors of people so the average person is not evenly split between both buildings. So, 100 1 story buildings and 1 100 story building average to 50 floors. (+/- and off by 1 errors as you go up 99 floors to reach 100th floor, but people also go to basements.)

That random post is way off. I was curious and even if you only include buildings 10 stories and up, the average is under 20. And if you have ever been to the boroughs, you would know that there are many houses and buildings under 10 stories.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-tall-apple-number-o...

Isn't average the wrong metric here though since such a low number of the 4 story and less buildings even have elevators to use?

I bet there's datasets for this actually.

Also that doesn't count all the stairs subway riders use which I'd imagine would be a huge portion of stairs walked in NYC daily.

A great elevator related programming game: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8929314

This is a great example of crafting a compelling narrative from a publicly available dataset.

> Maybe Willy Wonka’s Great Glass Elevator exists, after all

In all seriousness, is there something that prevents us from building Roald Dahl's ingenuity? Like if you had a corporate campus with a few towers, and when you climbed into an elevator, you input not just a floor number but a building letter too, and if the building letter was for a different building, the elevator would go to a subterranean level, disengage from that building's elevation mechanism, travel to the other building (maglev? subway style?), and re-engage with the elevation mechanism in the other building.

As anyone who's been asked to write an elevator emulator, it hard to optimize even when just going up and down. The extra mechanicals to go building to building would be non-trivial.

You'd have to use destination dispatch, which you tell the elevator console outside which floor, and it tells you which elevator to get on. You can't control the elevator destination from inside the elevator. I encountered one of these systems on my last trip to NY.

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

Recently I worked at a company that used the destination dispatch concept. It was terrible and during peak times huge groups of people would be waiting for their elevator. Not to mention you would easily miss your elevator in certain situations. Elevators would also become overpacked if only one person in a group selected a floor but this is more user error than anything.

I much prefer the approach where certain elevators go to certain floors. My building was only 20 stories but I’d imagine it would be even more of a headache in NYC.

Cross building destination dispatch would be terrible IMHO.

I stayed in a hotel using destination dispatch and it was pretty comical to watch. They actually had someone standing outside of the elevator part of the day explaining to guests how it worked.

A lot of people also seemed to think you could only make one floor request at a time. A large group of people was waiting at the elevator and after the elevator came for one of their floors, only one person came up to enter their floor. The look of surprise on their face when I walked over and pressed my floor and almost immediately got an elevator was pretty great.

I think the real problem with destination dispatch is that people just don't know how to use it yet.

There's one in the New York Times building and the first time I used it, I found it to be confusing & unsettling (since most people are conditioned to walking into the first open car they see)

I can see that in an office environment. Especially with access control. I was curious how it would work, so I went off to google for some product info.

some features that give me pause (what could possibly go wrong?):

"In addition, you can connect your elevators to tenant databases for increased building security."

"Grant private and priority elevator service for select tenants"

"Upload and display personalized images and messages"

this was just weird: "AGILE augmented reality application"

https://www.thyssenkruppelevator.com/elevator-products/agile

It's already here:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-sideways-elevator-of-the-fut...

New York does have a subterranean group-based people moving system already! The subway!

What if the elevators in the buildings also went down to the subway! :mindblown:

Doors between building basements and subway stations are not unheard of, though most were shuttered long ago.

I miss working in 111 8th Ave. because you could just walk right into the building lobby via some stairs into the subway. Now when it's raining during commute hours, I have to actually prepare. (The walk from my apartment to the subway station is just a few feet.)

It being cheaper and more reliable to have fixed elevators and other measures. And elevator reliability is huge.

Elevators have huge counter weights that weigh more than the whole cab. I've read that it takes more energy for an elevator to go down than up, depending on the load. I think (dis)engaging these weights all day would be one of the most difficult aspects.

To me what's interesting about elevators is the mathematics. First the control system and how it matches the cab to the floor level within millimeters. Especially on tall shafts where the cable undoubtedly stretches.

Second is how they activate the control system. For instance if you push the button while it's moving full speed, it has to know which stops it can make in time.

Also handling erroneous input, ie 12 year old me pushing all floors on a 30 storey building, at some point it becomes wise to my antics and cancels all the calls.

Then you have the (linear programming?) optimization of where to put the cars. Statistically most calls originate at the bottom floor. So you optimize time by not allowing all 4 cars to loiter near the top. This gets even more complicated if 2 elevators are moving simultaneously down and someone below presses Down. Which one should stop?

I have no idea how they actually do this stuff, but I know it's more complicated than it appears.

I guess you could have a chassis that is attached to the counterweights. The cabin could be on rails and drive onto the chassis.

Of course this would not work for small buildings as it would take up an entire side of the building. And for larger complexes it would be simpler to have a separate system of self driving pods that are separate from the lifts. This would be a much easier topology to optimise.

I think rather than a sideways elevator, they should make one that runs on an electrified track without a cable or counterweight. Just a motor that runs on a cog or something. You could then have multiple elevators on the same shaft, going the same direction. Then at a couple places, have switches that go sideways to the other track, just like a train.

So for instance you could have 10 elevators going up and 10 going down, using 2 tracks. With switches at the bottom, top, and middle. After someone is dropped off, the elevator moves to the down track until called. You could fit way more elevators and have more floor space for real estate. Plus you could harvest the electricity going down instead of burning it on the brakes. It would just need a really good safety to guarantee it won't plummet in a motor/power/computer failure.

(2016)

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