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Comment by brotherjerky | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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