Is It Time for Germany’s Doorless Elevators to Move On?
wsj.com
wsj.com
For those thinking it is odd to want to have some potential pain in your life, keep in mind that Germany is the birthplace of the PainStation [1]. Wanting your elevator to be gunning for you then makes more sense.
2. In case it was not clear, the passenger carts do not flip over when they go over the top (or under the bottom). They are suspended in a way that keeps them upright. If you fail to get off at the top you just come around and have another shot at your floor on the down side.
(Although a version that did flip would probably be extra popular there. See #1).
3. In an earlier discussion of paternosters, a link to a video of a modern take on this, by Hitachi, was posted [2].
It's an interesting approach. It has many of the advantages, but with no more injury risk than a conventional elevator. The basic idea is that the circulating cars are divided into matched pairs on opposite sides, with each pair independently driven by a cable. The shaft is not completely filled with cars like in the paternoster. There are gaps. Those gaps allow a pair to stop for passengers while other pairs are still moving.
So, if you are just a person running between departments, you can hop on. If you have luggage, kids, wheelchair, crutches or you are moving stuff between floors, you can use the traditional elevator as always.
So, they're neat, interesting, but probably irrelevant.
But removing them for safety? That's just stupid - just like the article.
Yet they still build stairs and escalators.
Come on, WSJ.
I guess no one would use a paternoster without exercising care.
It seems like there should be a fancier name for this effect.
Risk homeostasis affects both the cyclist and motorist as well.
Clearly helmets protect people, but studies of helmet law implementation do not support the laws.
Witnessed this once, the honking in front of my window went for ten minutes and I had to call the cops - total time needed over half an hour.
BTW, you also get more pollution. Modern car gearing makes 60 MPH (100 KPH) pretty reasonable; cars from the previous century do better at about 2/3 that speed.
If you can't control your road rage, hang up the keys and walk.
Why not?
People will drive. Generally they will take their rage with them to home or to work. Commute length is related to risk of heart attacks and divorce. Your ideas have a huge quality-of-life impact that extends far beyond the road. I could do without the medical problems and violence induced by road rage.
The ideal for quality-of-life is what you likely despise: lots of wide lanes with minimal need to stop or slow down. This puts drivers at peace. No, it isn't ideal for hipsters who have a thing for silly sidewalk cafes, but those aren't most people.
It also had round "slopecase" instead of staircases. This thing was surprisingly cool.
But beyond that episode, I know of no statistics.
Article in Danish: http://ekstrabladet.dk/112/80-aarig-draebt-i-elevator-paa-ax...
Anyway, though I've yet to use one of those lifts to me they look like a rather ingenious design (another aspect official buildings usually aren't exactly renowned for). Sure, they're not accessible but for most people they provide a more swift experience than common lifts.
This reminds me of the new (old) Routemaster bus models reintroduced recently that allow you to hop on and off while the bus is already / still driving (slowly, that is): Sure, it's a bit dangerous but to those willing to take that little risk and extra thrill they quite possibly provide a better user experience.
Two of them are out of order at the moment. I heard, that fixing one would cost about 900k €.
This being said, according to German Wikipedia in May 2015 there were still 240 paternosters in operation. You can browse the list at: http://www.flemming-hamburg.de/patlist.htm
However, I must wonder whether they can be used by the elderly or disabled. How do you board one with a wheelchair? Or do they just run alongside modern elevators in buildings where handicapped accessibility is a requirement?
Using it looks to require a skill set similar to that for riding an escalator. There's potential for mishap with either device. I wonder how safe the paternoster would be if it had modern safety devices, like a switch to shut it down if someone gets stuck in the parts? But one problem is that then everyone is stuck inside. You can just walk on an escalator when it's off.
Albeit somehow crude with no computers, infrared sensors or whatever, such safety devices are decades old.
For example, before the upward traveling cabin leaves the floor, there is a freely hanging wood panel -- if any part of you is sticking out, instead of being crushed in between the cabin and the next floor, you first hit the panel and lift it up, which trips a safety button shutting the whole elevator off. Or the last few inches of floorboards, both in the cabin and on the individual floors, are hinged.
As for being stuck inside when the safety trips -- having approximately one cabin per floor, each for two occupants at max, you are no worse than having a single cabin with multiple persons stuck in a traditional elevator. You can still walk on the adjacent staircase or use a traditional elevator. These elevators are also required to have a designated attendant (that does not mean a full time person sitting and doing nothing, for example a concierge can be in charge of that) and it is his or her role to immediately free (or call help) stuck people in case of safety cut out or power outage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T49PsI6maMg
For most human traffic, they are less tedious than elevators: less waiting, no stop and go, a constant sense of motion. I don't think their riders would feel trapped the way I sometimes do in slow, busy elevators.
I think of them like a compacted escalator. I wonder if they actually are more compact.
They are fun - so fun I went up and down a few times. (It was late, and the building was almost empty.)
They feel reliable. You hop on, you go up/down, you hop off.
You don't wait to see if the button you pushed actually did something, you don't try to find a place in a small herd of anxious people with decreased personal space, none of whom are talking, you don't get claustrophobia or any other phobia, and the jump on/off experience adds a frisson of excitement to your day.
And it's hard to get trapped in one. (Not impossible. But certainly hard.)
I suppose contact/proximity sensors at the limb/head-chopping edges would add to the cost, but conventional elevators are hardly 100% safe, so I don't really see the rationale for killing them off.
What I found most amusing is that you pass through a floor with full view of the people waiting, and so there's plenty of opportunity for awkward eye contact.
The building had no access controls at all. I walked into an unattended lobby and rode up and down for a while. I saw no evidence of vandalism.
I can't find that movie (maybe somebody knows) (Edit: German Wikipedia mentions Charlie Chaplin?) the only thing I can find is something completely different I've also remembered:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXBmUOjgWJE&t=8m20s
Back to the chain elevator, as a grown-up I rode in it, and it felt not scary, more like "safe enough" and even interesting.
But it surely isn't made for everybody.
Oh come on, VW is the largest car company in the world...
When you look at the frame, where you enter the elevator ("door", "door frame" or however it should be called):
- a part of the floor is on hinges, so if you had your foot stuck between an oncoming floor board and cabin floor while traveling up, it would "open" and trip the safety,
- upper part is actually a freely hanging piece of wood, so if you had your head or limbs sticking out while traveling up, you would lift the piece of wood and trip the safety.
No idea about the actual cabins -- for example if you kept hanging on the floor while the cabin travels down onto you -- but I suspect that the top of the cabin works similarly to the top of the "door frame". If my memory is correct, the cabins also had hinges near the edge of their floorboards (e.g., foot between the floor and the cabin traveling down), but no idea if these also stop the entire system.
Only the visible chain mechanism when overriding top or bottom looked unsafe to me, because I stick my hands everywhere :)
EDIT: I actually found a mention of regulation from 1982 stating that the sliding upper parts are mandatory both on the cabin and on the "door frame" and moving them must stop the elevator. The hinged floorboards on cabins and floors are also mandatory, but there is no mention that they should also stop the elevator. See [1] (in Czech) for pictures.
[1] https://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_document?p_tab...
Here’s a braindump. The overlong sentences are probably a symptom of too much coffee.
You’d have an “up” lane on the left and a “down” lane on the right, as in a paternoster or in Hitachi’s system mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9786871, but the cars wouldn’t stop in them; instead, you’d have a “station” at each floor in between the two lanes for the car to stop in without blocking traffic. (Popular floors, like typically the ground floor, would have several stations.) The cars would be small and light, holding two friends or a parent with some small children comfortably, with seatbelts and a maximum gross weight of maybe 300 kg; you could have a door to keep you from accidentally falling out of the car while it was moving, but it wouldn’t need to be automatic, since if you didn’t manage to get it closed, it would inconvenience only you (and whoever else is waiting to reach your floor, if you’re on a single-station floor.)
Once you are in motion, you continue to your destination floor without stopping; because you are sharing the elevator shaft with other cars, you don’t need to share the elevator car with other people. Your trajectory through spacetime to the destination station is reserved by the control computer before you leave the station, so that other cars will only crash into yours if there is a malfunction, such as a rail jam or a cable break. Much of the time, cars will travel through the shaft in convoys with their bumpers in contact with one another, limited by the speed of the frontmost car, which will greatly limit potential collision damage if a malfunction should happen.
(Probably the optimal number of stations on most floors is two, not one, because with two stations, there will almost always be one unoccupied station that your arrival can be scheduled into.)
Power and non-emergency braking are applied to the cars using the same cable-traction system all current elevators use (except for those shitty Otis hydraulic elevators, and those few rack-and-pinion elevators), but the energy is not applied to or removed from the cable by a motor; it is delivered to your car entirely from counterweights connected to your car’s cable through a system of CVTs and clutches. Low-power electric motors lift spare counterweights continuously to replace energy either lost to friction or stairway descents or currently stored in people or objects that haven’t returned back down to street level.
This system removes electric-power constraints to maximum acceleration, so that a continuous-jerk spline trajectory should allow comfortable ascents and descents with accelerations as large as ±⅓g. For a Burj-Khalifa-scale tower of 900 meters, ⅓g means you can comfortably travel from the bottom to the top, in any of the 100 or so cars, in about 20 or 30 seconds, reaching about 70 MPH in the middle of the trip, ten times normal elevator speed.
(Accelerating 300kg at ⅓g at 70MPH is about 43 horsepower, which is within the range of normal elevator power capacities, so it wouldn’t be impractical to build such a high-speed elevator system without the complicated CVT/clutch system, just inefficient.)
As with public-transit cable-car systems or cable tramways, your car can grasp and release cables dynamically, but it can grasp any of several different cables, allowing us to have more cars running at different velocities than we have cable loops and preventing cable breaks from being an emergency under normal circumstances.
And you would do all of this while taking up only the floor footprint of three small elevator cars on most levels, unlike the Burj Khalifa’s 57 large shafts, which run at one-third the peak speed described here and have to stop frequently because you share the car with a dozen other people.
(If you build a subway along these principles, you could use a 48-volt DC third rail; lightweight four-seat vehicles running on bicycle wheels powered by independent motors in the vehicle, rather than cableways; dirt-floored tunnels, unless you’re below the water table; and stations and lines spaced some 50 meters apart instead of 500.)
Betteridge's law of headlines in action, folks.