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It seems to be missing the real issue that you generally don't want lifts that go all the way to the top in one run because it uses up to much real estate.

You have to have multi-stage lifts else the whole building becomes full of lifts rather than offices etc

Much more exciting for projects like loon I would have thought.

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I don't see why that would be a real-estate issue, wouldn't the other stages of the lifts take up just as much space?

Lifts on the ground floor have to service the entire tower, where a lift that started half way up the tower would only have to serve half as much traffic as the ground floor lift, so you could have like a dozen lifts that go from ground->50%, and 6 lifts that go from 50% to top.

Because when you stack lifts on top of each other in different parts of the shaft you can have multiple lifts running at once, hence multiple time the efficiency per m2. (High latency though)

Lifts are also limited by speeds, if they go too fast they make some people queasy. This is also an issue to contend with since express elevator are limited in the 'express' bit.

Edit: to be a bit clearer if you split up a shaft into 4 sections with fours lifts you can have four lifts full of people being moved, hence your bandwidth is 4 times as much. Taken to extreme you have one for every floor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster

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