The complaints are legion: long waits, lurching arrivals, and the notoriously ineffective Close Door button. But recently, in Manhattan - a city with two-thirds of America's elevators - new elevator technologies have added some extra intelligence to shave off seconds from precious New York minutes.
"Where you had to wait 40 seconds for an elevator five years ago, we're cutting those down to nine to ten seconds," says Matt Ensley at elevator design company Motion Control.
The change comes as a radical one for most elevators, moving from archaic relay devices to smarter, microprocessor-driven systems. And the new designs have more than just time-saving capabilities. Corporate executives can now order private express service, building managers can examine customer complaints, and doctors can drive elevators during emergencies.
Integrated circuits installed in the control panel of the motor room allow a bank of elevators to "juggle passengers," says Thomas Kyle, facility manger at New York's 37-story Sony Building, where work on 25 elevators is coming to an end. "The old system, you'd put in a call running up to the 20th floor, and we'd have to wait until [that one] goes all the way up and reversed direction," says Kyle. "The elevators are just now learning to cooperate."
Traditional relay elevators operate on a series of electronic switches that simply notify the elevator when a call button has been pushed, batching requests without any priority.
"Before, you could walk though the motor room and hear the 'Click, click, click' of people pressing the buttons," says Ensley. "One integrated circuit takes the place of 40 relay switches."
In the SWIFT (Shorter Waiting Interval Faster Trips) Futura system - deployed in the World Trade Center and Rockefeller Center - a Windows 95 Wizard is used to control and troubleshoot elevators remotely. The Wizard lets technicians drive the cars through a 28.8 KBps modem connection, and even has a "Code Blue" feature that allows doctors to "steer" hospital elevators with a special key.
The floors in these new elevators function like a scale, weighing the number of riders, prioritizing the rides. "You've got a 40-story building, six elevators. Think about all the permutations of calls," says Ensley. "This complicated math couldn't have been crunched in mechanical relay."
By calculating the weight of the riders, the logic board can accurately judge the rise and settling speed to avoid a roller-coaster sensation. "You can't even feel the acceleration when the elevator takes off," adds Kyle. "Because the logic boards are constantly calculating, there's no lurching and the cars are dead-level with the floor so that there's no tripping."
Now if only they could do something about that awkward, interminable silence.
From the Wired News New York Bureau at FEED magazine.
