In my residential building, the residents are all served by 3 elevators. Although you expect to wait, there were times where I have waited for 5 minutes plus and gotten incredibly frustrated because it makes me late getting to work.
It provided me with some time to think about how, if I was designing elevators, what kind of things I would add in terms of features.
The first thing, I don't know too much about the mechanics of the elevator but let's just say that if I was designing it, it would have all the same features as the ones today in terms of safety and the pulley / counterweight system - the mechanics would most likely be the same.
The features I am talking about include:
1. Ways to cancel service to a certain floor
Let's say that you're heading to work. You need to catch a bus / walk to work and you leave at around the same time every day and have never had problems. This time, you leave your apartment / condo on the 15th floor and you call the elevator but unexpectedly, the elevator takes an incredibly long amount of time to come. As a result, you are late to work.
Most people, after waiting a certain threshold of time, would just give up on the elevator all together and take the stairs down. I've certainly done it many times as well: when you're short on time, you just decide that you can't take the elevator and that the stairs would be faster.If you're going to stop waiting for the elevator - why should the elevator stop at your floor now (presuming that you're the only one waiting for the elevator on your floor). Why should anyone that is in the elevator wait for the elevator to service your floor and then realize that nobody is actually there to be taken down (or up)?
Those would be fairly normal cases but there are also times where I have gotten into elevators and have found all the floors to be pressed - presumably someone who likes to inflict this annoyance on others. How great would it be to cancel all the floors that you do not want to go to and just leave the one floor that you do live on to be pressed? Pretty fantastic if you ask me and a great way to save time, I think.
2. ETA's on each floor
This is connected to the first feature I'd like to see in elevators - an estimated time of arrival. People are always rushing to get to places and if people actually know how long they have to wait, they can then judge whether or not it is worth it to wait for the elevator or not. You press the button, figuring that it would take about 5 minutes for the elevator to take you down and see that the ETA reads 15 minutes. "To heck with that", you yell, and you decide to take the stairs instead (hopefully after canceling the button on your floor).
Another useful thing the ETA can do is if all the elevators have broken down - each of the ETA's can have the sign for infinity - people would not only realize not to take the elevators because there's something wrong with them, but they'd also learn some math at the same time :)
3. Full capacity warnings
There's been a few times where I've waited for the elevator, waited for a long time, and then when it finally came, the elevator was full and I couldn't get in.
Wouldn't it be nice for the elevator to detect when the passenger car is full or cannot accept any more passengers? Imagine that a car fills up with passengers on the top floor and they all want to get down to the ground floor. Would it make sense to stop on any floors in-between the top floor and the ground floor? No it wouldn't, because no passengers want to get off and no passengers can get on. With this feature, the elevator can detect, based on weight capacity or on physical space, whether or not the car can accept more passengers. If it can't, then it acts like an express elevator skipping any floor where passengers want service until there is room in the elevator car.Ideally, in the first scenario with a full car, if a passenger / passengers did get off at a floor in-between the top floor and the ground floor, the elevator would then be able to accept a certain number of passengers in-between the floor that the passenger (s) got off and the ground floor.
This is also where the ETA would come in handy - elevators that are full in capacity would not be servicing any floors that is not the target floor inside the elevator - the ETA could then reflect these express elevators and update as soon as express elevators are available.
4. Proximity buttons
This feature is a bit of a stretch I have to say which is why I didn't include it in the features that I'd like to see, but it is an idea to decrease wait times and to help the elevator run faster.
The idea is that there are times where you'll get into the elevator with other people and they will all live around your floor - i.e. you live on floor 9 and two others get into the elevator who live on floor 8 and floor 10. In elevators now, each person would have to wait for the elevator to stop at 8, 9 and then 10 to get to their floors.
But what if the people living on floor 8 and 9 didn't mind taking the stairs? In this case, the elevator would stop at floor 10, everyone would get off and the two people living on floors 8 and 9 would then take the stairs down to their respective floors.
Why would this be handy? Imagine getting into the elevator and you live / work on the 28th floor. 3 others get into the elevator and they all press 8, 9 and 10. If two of them didn't mind taking the stairs, the elevator would stop at the one floor and then head on up to the 28th floor - it would be faster for you this way.
I know, I know, a bit of a stretch.
How would this be designed in the elevator though?
Imagine that in a 11 story building, there are no individual buttons but instead, buttons that read 3, 4, 5; 6, 7, 8; 9, 10, 11.
People that wish to get off on the 3rd floor would press the 3, 4, 5 button - the elevator would then stop off at either one of those floors (if on the 4th or 5th floor, the person would only need to walk down 1 or 2 flights of stairs to get to their floor). In this way, the elevator would not have to stop on each individual floor for people who live near each other (floor-wise).
What about you? What features would you like to see in elevators? Are there any features in elevators that you wouldn't want?
