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Comment by SeanLuke | Hacker News Reader

The magazine says this is because so many Spaniards live in lots of apartment buildings. But their graph shows that Spain has 19.8 elevators per 1000 people, while Hong Kong (!!) has only 10. Wait, what?

This smells like someone is forgetting a variable. In this case, it's probably the density of elevators per occupant. I'm guessing that Spain has lots buildings just barely too tall to be walk-ups. That's a much less snazzy subheadline.

For those unfamiliar, here's a beautiful shot of Hong Kong. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/HK_Kowloo...

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Buildings in Hong Kong are much taller on average therefore you don't need as many elevator instances to serve them. About 150m is the best height to optimise elevator floor area take versus area gained from additional floors. From the other comment, buildings in Spain tend to be 6-10 storeys (20-30m) whereas at a guess I would say that the average height in Hong Kong is much closer to 150m, hence the more efficient use of elevators per head of population.

Yup, this is exactly correct. The buildings here in Valencia are 6-10 floors on average.

An elevator serving 50 stories should count more than one stopping at only 10 stories. A better measure would be total elevator stops but as usual you are stuck with the available data - especially difficult to overcome with mult-country data like this.

The solution would be to count meters of elevator per person.

Or perhaps person-distance/time or mass-distance/time of capacity?

Mass-distance, sure. Time starts becoming a metric of the quality and vintage of the elevators involved, and not of the capacity.

That's still not good enough because a tiny one person elevator shouldn't count the same as a massive 30 person elevator.

Hilarious! I have had similar discussions - just about different data source.

I don't remember a place where a single elevator serves 50 floors

I've seen buildings where each elevator (set) covered around 12 floors (+ ground floor). This was for a building with +/- 40 floors

That's mostly for efficiency. Imagine going on the top floor and having to wait for 10+ stops on the way up. That said, I think split elevators are more common in commercial buildings. I've seen residential skyscrapers have elevators cover all floors. For example, One Rincon Hill in San Francisco has 3 elevators that all cover all 64 floors.

The five elevators in my building (Shenzhen) serve all 45 floors and it's a mess. I think I must have spent 10+ minutes waiting for the elevator once.

Spaniard here. 4 to 10 story buildings are the overwhelming majority here, in some areas it's also a matter of not altering the traditional cityscape (I think it's legislated in some municipalities, but can't give you references).

They were also easier and faster to complete by not exactly stellar construction companies, so they could be dumped into the market (and during Franco's rule, basically as high as you could go with their defective concrete), and I think a lot of my country fellows associate them with the summer town architecture and higher quality of life, while taller apartment buildings were left for lame sunday tourist Benidorm holidays.

There's really really very few people accustomed to living in tall buildings. Taller buildings were built during the construction boom, but a lot of them are vacant.

Law requires that any building with 4 or more floors must have an elevator

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