
New York’s Elevators Define the City (2016) - Osiris30
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/new-yorks-elevators-define-the-city
======
dsfyu404ed
>There are only about 30 elevator and escalator deaths in this country each
year. About 1,900 people die taking the stairs.

This is a great example of a useless statistic. There's no point in having it,
it does nothing at best and misleads at worst.

In order for it to be useful, at the very least it should be deaths per some
value that represents the relative frequency by which elevators and escalators
are used. Elevators and escalators are pretty much never covered in snow or
ice and it's a lot harder to fall down an escalator since you don't need to
move while on it. I'm sure if you replaced every small flight of stairs in
front of a building with an escalator a lot more people would die on
escalators.

>Some of the outlying entries in the data set are indeed legitimate. The
Barclays Center, home to the Brooklyn Nets and New York Islanders, has not one
but two freight elevators that each have a capacity of 80,000 pounds (13 or so
elephants).

The citation on this ([http://www.meielevatorsolutions.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/...](http://www.meielevatorsolutions.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/04/BARCLAYS-CENTER.pdf)) was a far more interesting read
than the author waxing poetic about boxes that go up and down so I guess that
makes up for the abuse of statistics.

~~~
Retric
I suspect Americans travel approximately as many if not more floors in
elevators than stairs, making a direct comparison more meaningful. Sure, you
can slice it by trips or time, but stairs still kill a lot of people each
year.

EX: NYC has 8.5 million people who probably average 50+ flights a day in
elevators. People may travel up and down stairs more frequently, but few
people are traveling anywhere near that far.

~~~
brotherjerky
> NYC has 8.5 million people who probably average 50+ flights a day in
> elevators

This is hard to believe

~~~
Retric
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.

~~~
typetypetype
Where did you get that average floor count stat? That sounds very high except
in parts of Manhattan.

~~~
Retric
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.)

~~~
typetypetype
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...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-tall-apple-number-of-
stories-in-nyc-skyscrapers-might-floor-you/)

------
ehmorris
A great elevator related programming game:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8929314](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8929314)

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gregorymichael
This is a great example of crafting a compelling narrative from a publicly
available dataset.

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solatic
> Maybe Willy Wonka’s Great Glass Elevator exists, after all

In all seriousness, is there something that prevents us from building Roald
Dahl's ingenuity? Like if you had a corporate campus with a few towers, and
when you climbed into an elevator, you input not just a floor number but a
building letter too, and if the building letter was for a different building,
the elevator would go to a subterranean level, disengage from that building's
elevation mechanism, travel to the other building (maglev? subway style?), and
re-engage with the elevation mechanism in the other building.

~~~
acomjean
As anyone who's been asked to write an elevator emulator, it hard to optimize
even when just going up and down. The extra mechanicals to go building to
building would be non-trivial.

You'd have to use destination dispatch, which you tell the elevator console
outside which floor, and it tells you which elevator to get on. You can't
control the elevator destination from inside the elevator. I encountered one
of these systems on my last trip to NY.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destination_dispatch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destination_dispatch)

~~~
wil421
Recently I worked at a company that used the destination dispatch concept. It
was terrible and during peak times huge groups of people would be waiting for
their elevator. Not to mention you would easily miss your elevator in certain
situations. Elevators would also become overpacked if only one person in a
group selected a floor but this is more user error than anything.

I much prefer the approach where certain elevators go to certain floors. My
building was only 20 stories but I’d imagine it would be even more of a
headache in NYC.

Cross building destination dispatch would be terrible IMHO.

~~~
RandallBrown
I stayed in a hotel using destination dispatch and it was pretty comical to
watch. They actually had someone standing outside of the elevator part of the
day explaining to guests how it worked.

A lot of people also seemed to think you could only make one floor request at
a time. A large group of people was waiting at the elevator and after the
elevator came for one of their floors, only one person came up to enter their
floor. The look of surprise on their face when I walked over and pressed my
floor and almost immediately got an elevator was pretty great.

I think the real problem with destination dispatch is that people just don't
know how to use it yet.

------
blatherard
(2016)

