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Comment by dperfect | Hacker News Reader

That sounds like two separate things then. Could you not have people select a destination without locking in an elevator?

(I've never encountered destination dispatch myself, so I'm not really sure how it works in practice)

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The way I've seen it work is that there's a touch screen in the elevator lobby. You tap a floor, and then screen will say "Car C" (along with an audible message). The problem is that then the system can't reassign you to a different car after that. You'll typically have a bunch of different people going to a bunch of different floors, and there would be no reliable way to communicate to each individual their new assignment. Each car will also typically display which floors it's going to when it arrives. I suppose that, rather than assigning a car immediately, you could have passengers check cars as they arrive to see if they're going to their desired floor. Then the system could do reassignment, but people would be scrambling to check every car to see if it's the right one for them, and that's assuming that they understood the system. It would be way too chaotic in practice.

Thanks for the context. That makes sense.

Display a set of floors on a big overhead screen (in floor order so they're easy to find), have the "elevator" column blank until the elevator is assigned, and let them watch the column that's going to show them which elevator to use.

But yes, this seems like a case of "unfortunately, people".

Little extra "fun" anecdote: my building has two banks of eight elevators, each servicing 20 or so floors, and has six destination dispatch kiosks: one at each end and the middle of each bank. The kiosks originally had nice metal buttons for each floor and you could easily tap yours as you walked by.

Sometime during Covid, the metal buttons were replaced with glass touch screens – which are totally unreadable on sunny days, because in our stunning glass-ceilinged atrium mezzanine they sit directly in sunbeams[0]. So now you have to walk up to the kiosk, shade it with your body, and squint at the screen to make out where to touch it.

[0] http://www.angel.net/~nic/photos/elevators.jpg

You could give each one a diceware-eff-wordlist-like "ID" when they input where they want to go, perhaps have a "group" and "single" button/column per destination in the menu as well to inform the elevator if it's a group traveling together, and importantly have a fast-food-pickup-counter style dispatch screen up top visible from the waiting "hall", that assigns you a cab with an appropriate notice/heads-up period so you can make your way over to the assigned cab.

After visiting a hospital with like 5 floors and 2 elevators people were having a hell of a time with just 'going up ' or down arrows

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