
The Sideways Elevator of the Future Is Here, and It's Wild - joshwa
https://www.wired.com/story/the-sideways-elevator-of-the-future-is-here/
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tristanj
Discussion from 4 months ago (248 points)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14935700](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14935700)

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jessriedel
Yes, the cautionary top comment by Animats is very important for evaluating
the likelihood of this reaching fruition.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14936667](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14936667)

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labster
> Wonkavator

I'm pretty sure the technical term is "turbolift".

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amelius
How about "train"?

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labster
Most trains I know have a big problem with the vertical, restricted to small
slopes.

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moepstar
The structure on Google Maps:
[https://www.google.com/maps/place/48°10'44.8%22N+8°37'30.7%2...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/48°10'44.8%22N+8°37'30.7%22E/@48.1788614,8.6257922,523m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x0!8m2!3d48.179119!4d8.62518?hl=en)

Wikipedia-Article (German, has more info):
[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aufzugstestturm_(Rottweil)](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aufzugstestturm_\(Rottweil\))

You can also see it from the Autobahn A81, driving to / from Rottweil...

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DanielBMarkham
It'd be interesting to see a large/tall building with a back wall dedicated to
an elevator grid. Each tennant, instead of a door to a hallway (or in addition
to it) would have an elevator door. Press the button, the lift shows up, and
it can take you to any other property on that building.

Eventually you could merge this kind of thing with other buildings, forming a
kind of grid. Going out for dinner? Ask Alexa for a ride while you're talking
in the foyer, 20 seconds later doors open and you're whisked away to a nearby
restaurant where all you have to do is exit the lift and walk to your table.

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ams6110
You're still going to need conventional hallway and stairs for fire exit.

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mcv
I work in a building with two cores each with 5 elevator shafts, and two
elevators per shaft. Sometimes the top elevator can't go down because the
bottom elevator is just below it. Having an elevator able to overtake the
other would be very nice.

Also, you could use one shaft for going up and another for going down. I
definitely see the usefulness here.

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gmueckl
Elevator shafts in buildings take precious floor space on every floor and end
up reducing the usable space a lot, especially in higher buildings that need
more elevators to get people up and down. It's a bit of a catch-22: the higher
you build, the less usable space you get per floor. Having elevator cabins
switch shafts reduces the number of shafts required. This is really going to
change how skyscrapers are designed.

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chriswarbo
I've seen the numbers for this a few times, but never any mention of
paternoster lifts.

I know the traditional design is mostly extinct due to safety concerns, but
I've always thought there's potential for e.g. making larger cars (say, big
enough for a wheelchair), spacing them out, and having them speed up and slow
down between stops, so they can linger for a few seconds rather than having to
hop on and off (which I found a little daunting at first ;) ).

Has anyone done a floor space vs height comparison of such lifts?

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yazan94
This sounds like some awesome tech, though the paranoid in me fears that in
the off chance power goes off, what would keep these mag-lev cabins in place?

Maybe someone can chime in on this thought experiment, but how would an
architect design this into a new building to take advantage of its full
potential? From what I can tell, it seems that the system would need multiple
horizontal planes for the elevator to run through as well as 1+ vertical
planes. And if this should be able to go horizontally across the floor, then
you might still need multiple elevator wells on a floor. With this design, I
fail to see how this would be more cost effective than the 40% use of a
standard system (in the article, Ctrl-F "40 percent")

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Chris2048
> what would keep these mag-lev cabins in place?

I'd give the engineers a bit more credit to think about such a scenario.

I guess the real advantage here is you no longer need one lift per shaft -
just dedicate a shaft as "up" or "down" and have lift cabins switch as needed.

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jarkre
Video showing them in action:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTsbFS4xmI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTsbFS4xmI).

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FabHK
Fun factoid from the video: skyscrapers are being built so high now that the
elevator cable can't support its own weight (let alone the cabin), thus
presumably the search for alternatives.

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mc32
This could be good for seniors or people with mobility issues, for the rest,
this will lead to articles about how lazy people have become and how we must
get outside and get fit or cave in under the unrelenting laziness afforded by
modernity.

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EGreg
Can someone explain this whole magnet thing?

Electromagnetism falls off with the square of the distance and works on really
short distances, no?

So how can it work to move an elevator all the way across a shaft? And what if
it fails?

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mcv
You don't use a single supermagnet at the top of the shaft, you use lots of
magnets all along the sides of the shaft. Think maglev. Or maybe railgun, for
a slightly less pleasant mental image.

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orcasauce
Reminds me of the People Movers from Disneyland's Tomorrowland. I guess
tomorrow is finally today.

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jondubois
More moving parts with a much more complex range of motion means it's more
prone to failure.

