The Sideways Elevator of the Future Is Here, and It's Wild | Hacker News Reader

The Sideways Elevator of the Future Is Here, and It's Wild

wired.com

52 pointsjoshwa24 comments

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Discussion from 4 months ago (248 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14935700

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

> Wonkavator

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

How about "train"?

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

The structure on Google Maps: https://www.google.com/maps/place/48°10'44.8%22N+8°37'30.7%2...

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

I have never used one, in fact only became aware of twin elevators this week from the recent EconTalk episode with Tim Harford. I'm wondering as a user of a twin elevator, how are you even aware that the elevator below is preventing you from descending? The only situation that I can think of where this would happen is if both elevators are taking passengers down to the ground floor and the higher elevator either has to wait for the lower one to fill or empty. Does this result in a noticeable delay? Do you notice that on average delays are actually lower compared to normal single elevators?

It doesn't happen often, but occasionally, I'm going down and the elevator doors wait a minute or so before they close. I assume I'm in the top elevator and the bottom elevator is taking longer than the system originally calculated.

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")

> 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.

Video showing them in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTsbFS4xmI.

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.

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.

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?

Presumably much the same way maglev trains work, there’s a rail or multiple rails the cabin is attracting/repulsing, which also acts as a linear motor.

The shaft is the motor. Huge motor, very expensive.

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.

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

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

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