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Smart Elevators Coming to Seattle
coaxial writes "Fujitec has unveiled a new elevator system for Seattle's Metropolitan Park West Tower. The new system uses touchpanels to group users by destination. Riders may wait slightly longer for the proper car, but the overall ride is shortened because the car stops less."
You know, down is nice...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
From TFA:
"One lady walked up to the kiosk, and I told her to enter her floor number, and she said, 'That's ridiculous,' " said Tim Mooney, Fujitec's west regional vice president, who was in Seattle for the launch.
The real-world functionality of this system should be an interesting battle between computer-simulated idealism and human greed. Ideally, everyone will be happy if their overall travel time decreases. But in reality, each one of the riders wants to have the fastest possible time all to himself, to heck with averages. The easiest way to game the system might be to simply enter your floor number over and over, to fool the computer into thinking there's an increased demand for that floor. Voila, private elevator!
It's almost like a test case for the collapse of communism. If everyone simply gave according to their abilities and received according to their needs, everyone would get to work sooner. But as soon as one guy punches his floor a dozen times and gets his private car delivered, the whole darned thing breaks down.
Or to put it another way, in Soviet Russia, Elevator calls YOU!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Hmmm, I smell an upgrade coming.. incorporate fingerprint scanning software into the touchpad.. and send an elevator car full of convicted felons crashing to the earth...
*EXCELLENT*
Don't anthropomorphize computers: they hate that.
Next, they'll give it a personality. A cheerful personality.
At this rate, Douglas Adams will overtake Clarke as the SF writer who predicts the future.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
It's so good to be alive these days. The hours I spend each day riding up to the 9th floor of my building could be exchanged for time spent waiting on the ground floor with dozens of other (now happy) travelers.
Thank you, Smart Elevator Company!
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
Human nature I suppose.
crazy dynamite monkey
Way back in the day I used to do some IT work for a company that made elevator buttons for the big elevator companies. It was one of the oddest companies you had ever seen.
I used to ask them why the basic "up/down" button was never replaced with a better control system -- you could request the floor you wanted to go to on the outside of the elevator instead of the inside. Sure it would cost more (needing buttons at every floor) but you could prioritize the elevator's path, saving money and time in the long run.
They told me it would never happen -- elevators would always be as they were. I guess he was mostly right, since it is now 10 years later and we still have up/down buttons, long waits, and no real efficiency in destination planning. I actually used to consider about once a year writing a paper on sorting the elevator destinations real time based on where people were and where they would be heading.
I'm surprised it finally happened.
A few things I wish elevators had (some jokingly just out of frustration):
1. On/off toggle. The idiot that hits the call button ten times would only toggle the button on and off 5 times. Let him wait, I hate the clicking sound.
2. On/off toggle in the elevator. Have you had the kid hit 10 buttons? I have. Many times. Have you had some idiot hit a few buttons by accident? I get it every week. Not that I'm in a rush, but come on, think before you hit a button.
3. Early elevator arrival notification. Tell me which elevator will be the one I'll be entering. I've been in some buildings where I'll miss 3 elevators because they don't notify you which one to wait by. Maybe they do this to prevent people from crowding the doors, but I'd rather people learn etiquette than have the crazy rushes you see in some Chicago lobbies.
4. VIP floor access. Pay $1 and get to your floor immediately.
5. BING muting. Have you been in these elevators that have to BING at every floor, even when you're going to the 33rd from the 1st? Yeesh, give me a mute button.
6. Free spray deodarant in each elevator. Talk about needing to teach people etiquette.
Riders may wait slightly longer for the proper car, but the overall ride is shortened because the car stops less.
Hmmmm, everyone I've ever heard complain about elevators (myself included), its the standing around waiting for the car to arrive, not how many stops it makes...
Keep tryin'!
-FL
Homer approaches an elevator somewhere in the plant and pushes the down button.
Homer: Whew! I made it the whole day without seeing her again.
[The elevator arrives and Homer gets in. The door closes and he notices he's crammed in with Mindy]
Aah! I mean, hello!
Mindy: [awkward] Heh...I guess we'll be going down together -- I mean, getting off togeth -- I mean --
Homer: That's OK. I'll just push the button for the stimulator -- I mean, elevator.
Developers: We can use your help.
But what we really want to know is does this 'smart elevator' prevent the annoying jackass from hitting all the floor buttons at the same time?
If so, this truly would be a wonderful invention.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
The elevators in the Marriott Marquis on Times Square work exactly like this, and they have been there for a while.
--RED
Actually, the wait time for an elevator will be shorter. However, because the user will not get to ride the first elevator whose door opens, the perceived wait time will be longer.
Sounds like the elevator has a utilitarian philosophy.
i think the best solution to this problem would be to upgrade it to web 2.0 using AJAX and an RSS/Atom feed.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
"One lady walked up to the kiosk, and I told her to enter her floor number, and she said, 'That's ridiculous,'
Apparently my mother-in-law was in Seattle this week.
Guidance system? Could it be they're planning to use elevators to launch guided missiles? Or perhaps launch people to exotic destinations? Or perhaps they mean guidance as in job placement. Can't you see some interviewee getting on and the elevator going "you don't want to work there."?
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
I could imagine looking up at the numbers above the elevator door and watch them go down to the floor where I am waiting 19, 18, 17, 16, 17, 18, 17, 16, 15 (my floor), 14, 13, 14, 13, 12, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 15 DING. That would piss me off way more than being in the elevator and going in one direction stopping at each floor to let on/drop off people.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
That's not what I'd call a real smart elevator.
I'd love it if somebody came up with a way for multiple cars to be able to share the same set of shaft/tracks and pass each other at designated points (or switch shafts). Instead of having, say, six shafts for six cars you should be able to double the number of cars (at least) in a tall building, given that if a car is heading upwards from floor 18 there should be no reason why another car couldn't use the shaft below, say, floor 16. Obviously there'd have to be serious work on collision avoidance (multiple redundancies), but I don't see why this shouldn't be possible.
And before somebody tries to patent that (assuming it's not already), consider this post prior art.
And while we're at it being able to switch to horizontal travel might be nice too (although the logistics of sorting out who gets to go where first might get tougher).
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Hopefully they aren't designed by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, makers of Happy Vertical People Transporters with the latest flavor of AI, GPP (Genuine People Personalities).
From the Restaruant at the End of the Universe
"Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition become terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as sort of an existential protest, demanded participation in the decision making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking."
Next thing you know, Starbucks will put Nutrimatic Drink Dispensers in all their stores.
Good luck, Seattle.
In the Times Square Marriott here in NYC, in the lobby each elevator has a keypad where you key in the floor you want to go to, and then it shows you on an LED display which elevator number you want to go to. It is actually kind-of confusing, because you type in one number and it gives you another, but after you clear that hurdle, it works great. You get in an elevator, it stops on your floor without further input, and continues to its next destination. I think about that elevator system a lot, despite only ever having used it twice.
I was coming back from lunch in the 15 story building I worked at and before I could press the button, two elevators opened in front of us. We stepped in the nearest one and hit the button for our floor and waited... and waited... and waited.
Then we noticed that the elevator across from us, with its open doors, had the white up arrow lit and we could see in the shiny walls that ours didn't. We crossed the hallway, got in and pressed our floor. The door immediatly closed and away we went.
I grumbled and my co-worker Randy chided me, "You don't think they hire people like us to code elevators, do you?"
Years later, I hope he is proved wrong!
5. BING muting. Have you been in these elevators that have to BING at every floor, even when you're going to the 33rd from the 1st? Yeesh, give me a mute button.
The dings aren't for you. Be glad that you can fucking see.
We're one step away from Willy Wonka's elevator system. - Adam
The Computations of AdamR
http://www.adamreyher.com
I think the BING sounds are for the benefit of blind riders, who can count the number of BINGs to determine which floor they're on. The same goes for the one-BING-for-up, two-BING-for-down tones that accompany each door opening.
For more information, click here.
I really like the Idea of the On/Off toggle. This would come in useful, when people decide to take the stairs. They could be courteous and turn it off, or motion/heat sensors could detect if the person left. This would also be nice inside the elevator, when you happen to press the wrong button. I think eliminating stops that aren't even needed would speed up the elevators much more than all this smart elevator stuff.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
>5. BING muting. Have you been in these elevators that have to BING at every floor, even when you're going to the 33rd from the 1st? Yeesh, give me a mute button.
They probably can't do this. Blind people need to count the BINGs to know what floor they're at.
If you hit every button, all the them go off.
It's been in practice for a while to keep the kids from being jerks.
Of course, they can hit all but 1 button. But when you get on, you just hit the other buttons until they all clear and then choose your floor.
I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
So your blind coworkers won't know when to get off? Those bings are there for a reason (not just to annoy you).
So this means you'll have to see the same people everyday in the elevator? That sucks. I enjoyed seeing the attractive women from the other floors every once in a while.
The post above wondered what would happen if someone tried to game the system by pushing the button a dozen times to attempt to get a car all to himself.
I see the fingerprint detector as being good for national security. We could have a 'do not elevate list'. The corporate president could find his name on this the same way Ted Kennedy found himself (ok someone with the same name but the effect was the same) on the no fly list.
7. A button to temporarily override that godawful buzzing sound if the door is left open too long.
I commute past this building, and it's only 18 stories tall! It seems like it would be best to premier the technology in a 40-60 story building where efficiency could be better improved by having more destinations.
As an embedded systems programmer, I've always wanted to write the elevator code to purposely bump down in priority any user who presses the button repeatedly.
Of course, as a backdoor, you'd use two shaves and a haircut and get top priority.
Another thing I would consider is to have a thermal imager, or something similar to count the number of people to prevent people from entering a large amount of people for a single floor in hopes for a private car, of course I would have it set to only use it when a certain threshold is reached (ie 4 of more entries for the same floor within a couple of minutes of each other).
I should be glad that we have technology to replace the BING for people who can't "fucking" see. How about just anouncing the floor number before the elevator stops?
33 floors, 33 bings?
Or 33 floors, no bings, and "You've arrived at 17."
You're right, I'm glad I'm not blind, those bings would still drive me nuts.
Instead of messing with elevator, my prof used a bit of social psychology. He had mirrors installed next to the elevator on every floor. Apparently, the self-absorbed students and faculty looked at themselves in the mirrors while waiting for the elevator, and lost track of their waiting time. From what I remember, complaints about the slow elevators got reduced to about 1/2.
Smart elevators with greedy dumb riders... forget that. I'll take the stairs and shower on the tenth floor.
I believe this is for the blind, so that they can count what floor the elevator is currently on. To keep things fair, should we also include a button which turns out the lights? :)
Even though you've just completely nailed it's utter failure to account for human nature?
If everyone simply gave according to their abilities and received according to their needs, everyone would get to work sooner.
Of course, then we'd all be ants and not human beings.
Your statement comes across as awfully nostalgic for an utter failure of an economic system that resulted in literally millions of deaths by starvation alone - let alone the way it gave totalitarianism a really simple way to dupe useful idiots.
> 'smart elevator' prevent the annoying jackass from hitting all the floor buttons at the same time?
I learned, that must be why they put the alarm button right in line with the floor buttons, so when you swipe the buttons with 2 fingers, you set the alarm also.
In Japan elevators outsmart you.
But can I earn some extra cash by providing counseling to neurotic elevators? What if they decide to experiment by going sideways for a while?
Why do overlook and oversee mean opposite things?
How about just anouncing the floor number before the elevator stops?
How about putting an overly complex electronics system into what is a simple mechanical device? The ding can be triggered by simple mechanical means. KISS. I'm sure you'd bitch a lot more when the elevator had to be taken out of service to troubleshoot the voice system.
When they changed the elevators at the Marriott Marquis Times Square, not everyone was impressed.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
All the major manufactures have a system like this, and most likely are already deployed in New York or LA.
This is not a new idea.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
A voice system is complex? My neighbor had a Halloween pumpkin that said 50 different phrases in gorgeous clarity that he paid around $10 for at the drug store.
Sorry, but I don't buy it. In fact, I bet in 10 years the bing WILL be gone. Voice response makes more sense than trying to count bings.
Also not to mention the matter of language. 33 isn't "Thirty-Three" in every language. But 33 dings is 33 in any language.
What I'd love is a read out telling you (1) how long your estimated time to arriving at your destination is, and (2) how long it would take to take the stairs.
There are many times when I would take the stairs if I knew it would be much faster, especially at conventions.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Many elevators have an on/off switch. It's usually labelled as "Emergency Stop" or "Run/Stop" so most people don't use it, but it's just a glorified on/off.
Stewie: "Yes, we all love 'Mr. Plow'! Oh, you've got the song memorized, do you? SO DOES EVERYONE ELSE! That is exactly the kind of idiot you see at Taco Bell at 1 in the morning!"
Seriously, just because there was a Simpsons about Homer riding in an elevator, does it necessitate quoting?
...on some elevators there is a lock... the man with the key ride non-stop to his destination...
I once witnessed a grown man press both the up and the down button to call the elevator (we both only wanted to go down). When I asked why, he informed me that pressing both buttons would make the elevator come faster. Luckily the down elevator came first, but no amount of reasoning during our shared elevator ride helped him to see the light. This was bad enough, but it's hard to imagine the elevator rage caused by idiots who press the buttons for all floors in an attempt to speed up the process.
and you want to know my opinion ??? is a royal _PAIN IN THE ASS_
in some cases you'll end up using the stairs, as i did frequently.
the problem with these elevators are basicaly the uneven distribution of people among the several floors. sometimes in the building i worked, the pannel would tell me to take a certain cabin an i was the only passenger to my floor at the moment, but the same cabin was also assigned to a floor with an auditorium in the exact time dozens of people were going to a presentation of a new product. there was people enough to fill some 4 cabins waiting in the ground floor. of course, when the elevator stoped, everybody jumped in and i had to wait. of course, since i missed the first trip, i had to rebook it in the touchpannel.
now you ask: "but why the system doesn't calculate the number of people going to a floor so the cabin doesn't get overcrowded ?"
simple answer: many people come in _groups_. yes, groups. co-workes who meet at the lobby, car pooler who work on the same floor, you name it. and it's obvious, that as soon as the firts member of the group types the destination floor on the touchpannel and gets assigned a cabin, why would the others also type ? they wont, because the system doesn't know about groups, so if each member types the same floor on the pannel, they might end in diferent cabins, and no one wants it. so they all go in the cabin assigned to the first guy, wich ends in an overcrowded cabin.
pain in the ass, pure and simple. who cares if the actual trip is shorter ? i rather a longer trip, with several stops (but at least i'm moving) than a longer wait in the lobby. waiting is much more stressing than a longer trip.
What ? Me, worry ?
I remember from undergraduate cs classes that algorithms like those for elevators are actually balancing 2 different variables: average wait-time and fairness (which essentially can be thought of as variance of wait-time). It seems this algorithm optimizes for average time, possibly at the expense of fairness. In a conventional elevator, I can easily make a fairly accurate guess about how long it will take the elevator to take me from where I am to where I want to go... and if I'm wrong, it means EVERYONE is slowed down. Its fair. The suggested system doesn't seem to make anything close to this strong a guarantee. "Average" wait-time is of course fairly uninteresting when actual wait-times can vary widely. If I need to get upstairs for some extremely important and time-sensitive reason (be it annual review or potty break) I don't want to wait an average of 30 seconds if waiting 10 minutes is a possibility. I'll take the predictable 45 second wait, thank you.
Thou shalt not begin a subject line or post with the word "Umm".
It's a great idea in concept, but in practice it doesn't quite work...
They had this system at Ameritech in Indianapolis many years ago (now SBC, now AT&T, but I digress...) which was being used for prototype testing (so Ameritech got a discount on their elevator service)
Instead of a touch panel they had number pad and LCD display but the functionality was the same.
Every morning there'd be a crowd of 20 people at Elevator A, 5 at Elevator B and 1 at Elevator C.
This led to users "hacking" the system by reentering in the same floor multiple times. This resulted in the system adding in more people to the elevator until you got an overflow and then another elevator would be assigned.
Flamebait my ass. I'm fucking sick of people who bitch about things that are put in place to help our disabled neighbors.
Can you imagine getting stuck in the elevator with a blue screen? AAAAAHHH!!
The company began its U.S. operations in Lebanon in 1977...
...not Lebanon?
How exactly does that work? Wouldn't it have been easier/more useful to start U.S. operations in the U.S.?
:wq
"This is the thirty-third floor. Going up."
...
They actually had one of these in a building I worked in. It was only in the freight elevator, and it wasn't a very tall building.
But then, there's the morning rush.
"This is the second floor. Going up."
"This is the third floor. Going up."
"This is the fourth floor. Going up."
Talk about annoying.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
...go stick your head in a pig!
Of course, once the users become accustomed to this, they'll probably use elevators in other buildings thinking "how quaint".
There are absolutely times when you're willing to try climbing out the mythical hole in the top of all TV elevators just get away from some seriously bad perfume or B.O.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I don't think it needs to be said at every floor it passes, only at the floor it stops at. Or is that what you meant?
The weird thing is, I know I've been in elevators with blind people (considering I make about 1000+ rides a year and I've maybe seen a handful in my life) and almost always I've had to let them know what floor it was. I don't think the current system works, but it probably placates the ADA cops.
Obligatory H2G2 quote:
It should be explained at this point that modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient electric winch and maximum capacity eight person jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter as a packet of peanuts does to the entire West Wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital. This is because they operate on the unlikely principle of defocused temporal perception, a curious system which enables the elevator to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing, and making friends that people were previoiusly forced to do whilst waiting for elevators.
Not unnaturally, many Lifts imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up or down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision making process, and finally took to sulking in basements.
At this point a man named Gogrilla Mincefriend rediscovered and patented a device he had seen in a history book called a staircase. It has been calculated that his most recent tax bill paid for the social security of 5,000 redundant Sirius Cybernetics workers, the hospitalization of a hundred Sirius Cybernetics executives and the psychiatric treatment of over seventeen and a half thousand neurotic Lifts.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
The PriceWaterhouseCoopers building in Auckland, NZ, already has this. It works very well. The only problem with it is when first time users walk into an elevator and realise there are no keypads. They try to speak to the elevator Star Trek style.
A blind person isn't being annoyed by the lights.
Beware of geeks bearing formulas.
all i can think of...
me: "Elevator i need to go to floor 5"
elevator: "Sorry dave i can't do that."
me: "Elevator i'm not dave and i have to go to floor 5 now"
elevator: "Sorry dave stopping at that floor is inefficent, since theres a greater demand on floor 7"
me: "you peice of trash, i'm on floor 2 now, you go right past floor 5"
elevator: "sorry the magic 8 ball of elevator destinations says outlook not so good"
me: "what operating system runs this thing.. windows ME"
all i know is that i don't want to be the maker when the first image of these "smart elevators" shows up on thisisbroken.com!
The on/off toggle is seriously going to piss you off the first time the little lamp or diode breaks, and they always break.
Yeah, I'd hate for them to put an overly "complex" device in an elevator.. like modern safety equipment or emergency communications systems. That would be such a terrible burden on our society.
I worked in met park west for about 4 years. They've been largely vacant since the company I worked for left. They've been remodeling both met park west and east for the last few years. Still, I have to say bennaroya (who owns all 3 met park buildings) is an evil company who only cares about the bottom line.
Ba
Da
Bing!
Also - whats wrong with the Bing? Say that to his face!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bing_Crosby
I was just thinking to myself, "what I really want is an elevator ride a few times a day where I cannot predict the number of stops, the order of stops, or how long it will take to get to my floor."
Well, look -- someone made one. Excellent. THIS will really play hell with the kids in hotels that push EVERY button a thousand times. Between them and the greedy, loud-cell-phone-talking, expensive-shoes-wearing yuppies pushing their button a thousand times to get priority, here's what I expect to see:
"Error: Overflow error 2102 adding user 32768. (A)bort, (R)etry, (I)gnore, (F)all to your death?"
So, its annoying, unpredictable, and dangerous -- but at least it will be expensive.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Oh please, oh please, can we see toggle buttons in elevators? How many times have you hit the wrong button and wished you could toggle it off?
I've seen such elevators in Mexico City since a few years ago.
Omar
The Mariott Marquis on Times Square has this system install installed. It's a massive pain in the ass.
1. The system expects each passenger to enter their floor number once. It uses this to figure out the demand for the various floors. But what do people do when they're impatient for an elevator? That's right, they push the button again. And they did that with this new system too causing it to think that there were 200 people who wanted the 10th floor.
2. It may work for low volume elevators, but not at the Mariott Marquis. At one point I had to wait nearly an hour (seriously, I think it was 45 or 50 minutes) to get an elevator. Why? Because it was just before show time and all the people going to Broadway shows were trying to leave too and the elevator system overloaded. This happened often enough that they had bellhops running the elevators they had yet to convert just to make sure that it was possible to get to your room.
3. Complete lack of feedback. You punch in your floor and it tells you what elevator number to use. And then you wait. And wait. With absolutely no feedback mechanism. You don't know what floor the elevator is on, if it's going up or coming down or broken down.
4. This isn't really a problem with the system, but a problem in general. People are really, really stupid. It was really funny the first few times I'd see someone jump into an elevator (not the one they were told to go to) and then look for the button to push. Oops, no buttons. This elevator system works completely differently from the way people are used to it working. Considering that most people can't figure out how to use a toilet if you move the flush handle do you really expect them to use this? And their inability to use it just causes people like me how did figure out to use it more trouble. Them plugging in their floor number 8000 times makes everything slower and eventually overloads the system. And then I get to wait 45 minutes for a damn elevator.
How amusing that Novell Netware greatly reduced file access times with a technology called Elevator Seeking that allowed the OS to pick up all the segments of a file, in random order, in a single sweep of the drive platters and now elevators are going to introduce head thrashing as if it were a good idea.
I guess time will tell.
Here in Japan, we've already got that. Admittedly I haven't seen the technology used in public elevators--probably because someone would accidentally switch off somebody else's floor, and the next thing you know umbrellas are being drawn--but at my former employer's office in Makuhari, it was in fact possible to turn off a floor button by pressing it for 2-3 seconds. (It's the NTT Makuhari Building, in case anyone works there and wants to try it, and it only works on the central blue elevators that stop at all floors.) I've since changed jobs so I can't check the elevator maker or model, but vague recollection says it was Mitsubishi.
So blind people can't hear the doors opening and people getting on and off, but they can hear the bings? OK...
I'm a crunchy granola computer type who works in a 15 story building.
If I know there are people on most of those floors that want to talk to me, one of my favorite things to do is to get in the elevator, not press ANY buttons, and let the Gods carry me to my next assignment.
This new elevator paradigm will completely screw that up.
(I know this will get modded "Funny", but I am completely serious)
The concept of automated, direct-to-destination travel has been around for a while. Personal Rapid Transit is a city-wide automated system that would deliver a small group of passengers to their destination transit stations without stopping at other stations along the way. Non-stop travel is faster and more energy efficient.
A link and another link.
The hotel I stayed in Tokyo last month had bilingual elevators. It annnounced the floor and direction in Japanese then English so it's not like it can't be done.
By the way I highly recommend this hotel for anyone looking for a reasonable plce to stay in central Tokyo.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
I'm fucking sick of people who bitch about things that are put in place to help our disabled neighbors
I sick of people like you who force people like me to do something against our will.
First, my brother-in-law is fully disabled, and we will be taking care of him when my mother-in-law passes on.
Second, my other brother-in-law had MS (and died recently) and he was wheelchair bound.
I deal with disabled people in my family, and I have some friends who are disabled as well. They agree with me that the ADA laws are made in order to control businesses and take care of cronies (who own many companies that handle ADA compliance).
My experience as a business owner:
A bar I used to go to was upstairs. They had no elevator. The 2 wheelchair bound customers was always helped up the stairs by the bouncers, and they never had a complaint. The bar had $1 beers. When they had a small kitchen fire, they had to close down because the repairs couldn't be performed without updating the club to ADA compliance -- requiring $150,000 in upgrades. The building to this day is unused for this reason.
My church received a $1 million donation of a building we needed to expand. The building was built in 1953, like an old fashioned church. It has great acoustics (I direct video and sound). We need to knock out a wall to handle the additional 100 people we're expecting to come. We can't. The previous church installed a $50,000 elevator, but the ADA compliance people say we need to put one in the front of the building (there isn't room). We can't expand.
A neighbor of mine recently became disabled. He called a company to build a ramp so he can get up to his home. Because of government mandates of ADA compliance, the price of building ramps is over 3 times higher than it should be given the amount of work that is being performed. Companies know they can charge more because they are mandated to do work.
The law doesn't help the disabled, it helps the enabled who happen to have on bigger disability: they're friends with those in office.
They'll still get on the first elevator that stops. Even with "conventional" elevators, there are many people that get on the elevator that's going the wrong direction, just because the door opened.
we have one in our building in Houston and i'm a big fan. of course, there are times when i can't help wanting to tinker with the algorithm a little bit...but it DEFINITELY beats out the standard system. at an previous job we were on the top floor of a bank of elevators, and it truly was intolerable. it was *impossible* to ride the elevators either up or down from our floor without stopping several times. these pre-assignment systems are VASTLY superior. that said, i think that they shouldn't be used in "public" areas. i definitely can see where in a hotel or other area with lots of user-churn you would have lots of people getting on elevators and going to the wrong place. however, in an office building where the majority of the users know (or quickly learn) the system, i think (properly implemented) it simply can't be beat.
Sorry, but I don't buy it. In fact, I bet in 10 years the bing WILL be gone. Voice response makes more sense than trying to count bings.
"You've arrived at the thirteenth floor."
"U bent bij de dertiende verdieping aangekomen."
"Vous êtes arrivé au treizième plancher."
"Sie sind im dreizehnten Stock angekommen."
"Siete arrivato al tredicesimo pavimento."
"Você chegou no décimo terceiro assoalho."
"Usted ha llegado el décimotercer piso."
Quite the tower of Babel there. I'd hate to be at an international conference.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
"Fujitec competitors Schindler and Thyssen have similar systems, but Fujitec says only its system incorporates artificial intelligence to learn the building's traffic flow.
"Our competitors are using destination-based systems, but they do not use predictive logic with historic data," Rennekamp said."
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
How about putting the kiosk system on the LAN? Enter your destination at your desk, let the wait time be the 60 seconds it takes to walk to the elevator (or enter a specific wait time say 5 minutes), and have no standing around!
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Quite the tower of Babel there. I'd hate to be at an international conference.
:)
Haha. Here's the thing though: in all my international travels (quite high in number) in the past 10 years, I have yet to meet anyone who doesn't understand English numbers. I've met old ladies in small stores in the backwoods of Poland who can understand THREE THREE ZERO DOLLARS.
When it comes to the States, I can't even think of one person I've met who doesn't speak English, except for the hispanic church that rents my church out on Saturday
At my old apartment building I had an apartment right next to the elevator. I was awakened by that buzzing several times. Steps to stop buzzing:
1. Pull emergency stop switch.
2. Push emergency stop switch.
3. Go back to bed.
(Optional step 2.5: Call super to bitch about elevator)
For more information, click here.
Back when I was in college (three guesses where...), there was (and still is) a building on campus with five floors and four elevators. It was a mess. If you were unfortunate enough to have a class on the fifth floor, you had to endure sharing it for more than a minute with dozens of sweating and smelly riders (it wasn't air conditioned)... roughly 1/4 of whom got off on each floor (slightly weighted towards higher floors, but not as much as you'd think). Going down after class was even worse... the cab would be COMPLETELY filled on the fifth floor, but stop at every single floor on the way down to take on additional riders who wouldn't have fit inside. During the span of a single class change, maybe a dozen people would actually go from one floor of the building to another (rarely, professors... they just took the stairs because it was less frustrating).
What I suggested was simple... between classes, each elevator should serve only two stops: the ground floor, and ONE other floor (#1 goes to 2, #2 goes to 3, #3 goes to 4, and #4 goes to 5). It would mean that someone wanting to go from the fifth floor to the second would have to go down to ground, switch elevators, then go up to the second... but the other 99.9% of the riders would have an express ride directly to where they wanted to go -- increasing capacity by eliminating time-consuming futile stops (especially on the "down" trip). The doors would open, the elevator would completely empty out, the cab would completely fill, and go straight to the other floor it served, where the same process would be repeated. No more stopping at intermediate floors where "nobody" (statistically) ever got out, and nobody could have boarded anyway.
Of course, the suggestion was completely ignored. But I still think it made complete sense...
Yawn. Dude you're so anti-regulation that this doesn't surprise me in the least. Your anecdotes do not justify a policy shift (wrt the overall goals of ADA.. implementation is always another matter), and your opinion is not any more important or right because you have disabled family members.
I sick of people like you who force people like me to do something against our will.
There's nothing forcing you to be part of society. But if you're going to be, then there are certain things you're going to have to do.
The law doesn't help the disabled
That's simply false and doesn't even merit a response.
Say that to his face!
We can't. He's dead, and his face has decomposed. We do what we want now.
Laboratory hazmat shower.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
That's simply false and doesn't even merit a response.
Let's see how I can pwn this comment with a response of some articles covering how the disabled are hurt by the ADA laws and complaince regulations:
If You Weren't Disabled Before the ADA, You Are Now by Greg Perry
ADA Success? At What?
What is disabled?
These are my top 3 favorite articles (different authors, same website that keeps a good list of pro-liberty pieces). Read them and you'll see that the ADA is not helpful.
By the way, I have disabled friends and family who all agree it is harder to get a job and costlier to be disabled now than 10 years ago. What is your basis to repudiate what they've told me? Are you disabled? Do you live with a disabled person? Do you employ disabled people? I have a full time IT tech that is deaf who has worked for me for 3 years, and I pay him double what he received at his previous job. I also have a blind sales person who travels for me (he's legally blid 20/400 in his best eye) internationally. I do think I have something to say over what you do, my "theory" is based on facts in dealing with the disabled. Your "theory" seems to be based on class warfare.
The reason they'll never change is because they're 'almost' foolproof. The only way you can cause havoc is to press all the buttons. Thats what will get your ass kicked/stabbed by someone having a bad day.
Imagine one eight year old standing there pressing every different button repeatedly until the elevator starts going up and down randomly because its confused.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
They need to couple the touchpad system (or a voice system even) with a visual recognition software and cameras to verify the actual number of people waiting. That way it can tell whether there really are 40 people waiting to go to a floor, or if it was just that annoying guy pressing the button repeatedly.
If they had it track faces according to when they pressed, etc, it could actually automatically remove floors if the people changed their mind and took the stairs - or update the stats if you picked a second different floor.
Course then people will start worrying about privacy issues, but it seems like the most efficient way to do it.
This will change the world! It will change the way we build cities!!!
Riders may wait slightly longer for the proper car, but the overall ride is shortened
I work in a high-rise in downtown Los Angeles and I have never been irritated at how long the elevator took to get to my floor after I had boarded. The problem is always how freakin' long I have to wait for an elevator to show up after I press the call button. This is retarded.
"new" elevator system? How is this "new"? I've seen this for many many years throughout European office-buildings.
It's probably just as "new" as the US thinks direct-water-heaters (instead of hot-water-tanks aka boilers) are "innovative"...
<grub> Reading
OK. So I don't live in a large city with towering office buildings so I do not know how long it normally takes to take an elevator to some floor. However, if you have to wait longer for the elevator but the ride is short, isn't this the same as getting on right away and having a longer ride? In the end, it all evens out. So two people entering the same building: one waits for the "optimized" elevator and one gets into the next avaialble one. Wouldn't they arrive on the same floor around the same time?
Yeah these new elevators are great if you are a priest. But what if you are a hunter? Nobody will want you in their group, and you'll be stuck at the lobby meeting stone for hours.
The Marriot in Times Square has had a system pretty similar to this for a while.
$ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'
This may be true in the narrow context of your life, although probably less so than you think. But it's not true everywhere. I spent years in the transit industry, which is one of the places where ADA has caused the biggest changes. Today, pretty much all new transit vehicles are being ordered with automatic stop-announcement hardware (which comprises both illuminated signs for the deaf and voice recordings for the blind).
If you've ever listened to old-fashioned manual stop announcements on any system you can understand why this hardware has been a major help to disabled riders. And it only is being installed because of threats of lawsuits by disabled advocacy groups under the ADA.
The ADA has also precipitated, by itself, a shift to low-floor equipment for both bus and rail lines -- which benefits the elderly as well as the disabled -- and dramatically changed attitudes toward serving disabled customers in the transit industry as a whole.
In any case, why would the ADA change the price for building a ramp? It's still the same concrete and metal. And if the demand for ramps caused by the ADA is really that great, you'd think more ramp contractors would have shown up to at least partially offset the increased demand.
And it defeats the purpose of the law to say "the customers weren't complaining, so why should we comply?" The whole idea behind disability-law reform is to allow people to move and live independently, not at the mercy (i.e. pity) of bouncers (or relatives, or anyone else). If disabled customers can't get into a business without begging for help, and the business refuses to upgrade accordingly, the business should be shut down.
ding (1) ding (2) ding (3) ding (4) ding ding ding hello? no ding I'm ding in a ding elevator ding.
... wait 10? 11?
Crap was that some guys cell phone ringing, dinging or
Hello? Excuse me what floor am I on? Hello
I think if I was blind I'd rather have floor numbers then having to count dings or hoping someone was still with me when I got to my floor.
I'll stick to the dumb elevators thank you.
Funny, you say that it is the "stupidest system for elevators I've ever seen" and yet the situation you describe is caused by the stupidity of the elevator passengers.
You probably shouldn't click this.
Actually a better redesign of an elevator system should be used. In very tall highrises why not setup the elevator so it runs in a loop. Cars go up one shaft and come down another shaft. You can then introduce additional cars as needed based on passenger traffic.
For example: in the morning most people are headed up. As you fill a car at the first floor it leaves and almost immeaditly a new car is loaded into the shaft and filled. As the first car empties out and reaches the top it swings over into the down shaft and returns to the bottom, either to be refilled or to be shifted into storage if the rush is over. Depending on how many floors the building had you could have a dozen cars in the same shaft at a time, possibly more. It would all work like some of the rides at Disney where they shuffle cards on and off the tracks as needed or for maintance.
The system in the article could still be used and group people by floor into the same car, there would be less wait for the next car load and next group of floors.
So I guess Leon Starr is going to have to update
his Executable UML Elevator example.
The models are the code...the models are the...wait..
Did someone say models?
...and you could use another obvious solution in use almost everywhere: group the elevator lobbies into banks by each of 1/2 or 1/4 the number of floors and/or by odd/even numbered floors. I would put money on that after all the AI and "fuzzy logic" analysis of daily behavior, you would end up with much the same pattern in almost any building.
So, when the building doesn't have a 13th floor (like the one I work in) do the blind people get off one floor too late, or do they get off one floor too early when the building does have a 13th floor?
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Ah, so I read some opinion pieces, complete with more anecdotes, and I'm suddenly cured! Right. I'm not saying ADA is perfect, but I'm not going to call it bad social policy because of some Rockwell pieces. The first article focuses mainly on employment and ADA. We aren't really talking about that piece of the law, and I'm unsure if I support that piece, as well. The 2nd piece speaks mainly to the employment portion also. The third article is a direct appeal to fear and the wallet, trying to say that ADA costs you money. And he couldn't even find 10 good items!
"You pay the moral and ethical degradation when retroactive laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act pass." "You pay cost in lost time as you walk by row after row of empty wheelchair parking spaces to get to the front door of any American business." Oh no! I demand retribution for those 30 seconds!! The guy mocks the doorknob requirements of ADA with an appeal to common sense that simply lies about the law (round doorknobs, simply put, are not illegal. I've got em in my house, call the cops!).. then he had to invent a hypothetical requirement as the 10th item.
But on the subject of regulations and money.. yes, the ADA costs money. But guess what, so do labor protections, environmental protections, S-OX, food and drug regulations, and just about every other regulation. Yes. Regulation increases the cost of business. I'm not going to cry about that. It's the cost of a better society. I understand you don't agree. Luckily there's more people who agree with me than you.
How about a bunch of handles around the interior that you can hold on to and include little braille display pads that reconfigure to identify which deck you're on.
But no having to twist that handle to activate the lift. That would be silly.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
A voice system is complex? My neighbor had a Halloween pumpkin that said 50 different phrases in gorgeous clarity that he paid around $10 for at the drug store.
Sorry, but I don't buy it. In fact, I bet in 10 years the bing WILL be gone. Voice response makes more sense than trying to count bings.
Analog gauges are better for continuous data that has an upper and lower limit. Look at your speedometer if you don't believe me. In the 80's they tried digital ones, and they are hard to read and look goofy.
Nobody going to the 18th floor cares if they are currently on 3 or 16. All they care about is the progress towards their goal.
Like the late Mitch Hedberg, blind people know what floor they're really on.
"What room are you in?" "1401." "No, you're not! Jump out the window; you will die earlier!"
For more information, click here.
Rather than tinker with what basically amounts to a old design, an entire redesign might solve the inherent problems.
Current elevator design is basically a shaft, a box with buttons, and a counterweight. This was designed when using elevators was moderately complicated, and it required a controller to stand in there and position the box at each floor.
Every elevator since was simply a rework of the same basic design.
How about some new designs? We have much better technology now than when these were first made.
Basic assumptions made for elevators that should be tossed:
1) 1 elevator per shaft.
2) elevators can only go up or down. (no need for wonka references here.)
3) elevators have to be boxes that hold up to 12 people at a time.
4) each elevator goes both up and down.
Lots of possibilities open up. Like the elevator in Star Trek. There's one at the doors all the time. No waiting required. It takes you to your destination, and I presume another one pops up ready at the start position for the next person.
Pneumatic-driven tubes. Walk into the signle-person tube platform, push your destination, and it lifts you to your floor. Once it arrives at the travel tube, it slides into the next section so that you can exit to your floor. Each tube goes one way, so there would have to be at least one for each direction.
With waiting tubes, you don't get nearly the buildup of passengers waiting to get on between elevators. Sure, if many people suddenly arrive and need to go up or down, there might be a line while people enter a tube and go to there floor. Obviously there would have to be a pause between each entry, just like getting on the freeway. But with each tube going one way, you don't need to wait for the thing to return.
If the tube is often having people waiting, just add another tube. It should be moderately cheaper and smaller than an entire elevator. A single set of tubes would probably take half the space of a normal elevator.
It might cost more to run, as counterweights wouldn't be involved, but it shouldn't cost more than running the lights 24 hours a day like some buildings do.
Safety might be an issue, as current elevators break and simply stop moving, but I envision this as having far fewer moving parts.
So, for the first floor we hear 1 ding. Second floor, 2 dings. 33rd floor, 33 dings. By the time you get to the 40th floor you've heard 820 dings.
If that's not enough to induce elevator carnage, I don't know what is. Me: "I just want to get to work!" Elevator: "DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING!!!!!!"
Yawn. Dude you're so anti-regulation that this doesn't surprise me in the least. Your anecdotes do not justify a policy shift (wrt the overall goals of ADA.. implementation is always another matter), and your opinion is not any more important or right because you have disabled family members.
We don't need regulation. What is different about hanging out with people at work vs your home?
My cousin has been in a wheelchair since 1989. He basically hasn't worked or done much for other people since. He just drives around an parties all the time.
The reason he doesn't work is because the government pays him with our social security money every month. He gets like $600 or so a month, and does under the table jobs from time to time.
Because of the government regulations, its next to impossible for him to get a wheelchair, even though the government pays for the thing.
He should buy his own fucking wheelchair. I don't want the government even thinking about it. How does his wheelchair issues affect the public at large? It doesn't.
I'm disabled too. My vision and hearing is bad, so I wear glasses and a hearing aid. These are basic things I need to go to work and help other people. I have to buy them myself. My cousin has to wait for weeks or months to get his wheelchair that I pay for. Its ridiculous.
Entering the same floor over and over again would have little effect, entering many nearby floors might, but probably the wrong one... you'd get the elevator faster, but you'd still have to stop at every floor...
maybe I should read the TFA...
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
I like where your head's at on most of the upgrades, however, I think the *Ding* noise allows blind elevator riders to determine how many floors they have traveled.
Good post. Sorry to hear about your disabilities. I concur about getting a wheelchair -- my brother-in-law that passed away needed a wheelchair, but since they're normally paid for with public dollars, they're almost impossible to buy privately. They were thousands and thousands of dollars and impossible to get. So he waited for one for 2 years (public aid) and bought a used one (1970s model) for around $400.
I'm assuming that you're finding more ability to "get around" because of the Internet, not less, right? My father is now legally blind and the Internet has completely changed his life.
heat sensors
Elevators used to have heat sensitive pads. You could lightly tap the pad and it would call the elevator. Heck, you coulk=d breath on it and it would trigger.
But....
People WILL get on an elevator during a fire. And of course the heat sensitive pad would trigger from the fire, so you had the situation where (during a fire) the elevator would helpfully take you right to the floor where a fire was raging.
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
and I actually goto this buidling, but I have not yet tried it, as it was still under contruction about a week ago when I was there last. I always wondered, wtf will I do with that? The building only has 17 floors that can be accessed from the main elevator(my client is on the 17th floor). I could picture this being helpful with a place like the sears tower with way more floors. But, sure enough, wierd to find them on slashdot.
No. Because I am this kid.
This happened at my last job all the time. Four story building with no stair access going up (stairs were only accessible if you were going down). Coming back from lunch, the elevator would stop on the 2nd floor either because someone hit the up button or someone would be getting of. Then everyone crowds into the elevator only to find out that the elevator was going up to drop me off at the 4th floor. Had they paid attention to the damn up light and bell and have waited 15 more seconds for the other elevator, they wouldn't be wasting their bloody time.
All the damn time did I see the doors open for the 4th floor with people in the elevator and no one getting off. It's a good thing they laid me off (it's not related), I would have started to insult their intelligence. Mind you, it's not a big building and there aren't a lot of people there. A sizable portion of the bottom end of the gene pool worked in the building.
v I spent years in the transit industry, which is one of the places where ADA has caused the biggest changes.
Because of ADA or because the transportation companies realized it woul make good market sense? The problem I have with ADA and the transit industry is the increased costs for everyone. You're talking about the many OVERPAYING for the few. I don't think it is fair to make everyone disabled financially -- and I'm the one paying for a few members of my own family (and employees) who are disabled. Regulations don't seem to help as far as I can tell -- I don't see a boom in the number of disabled people I see in daily life. You'd think with all these new "fixes" we'd see more of them.
. And if the demand for ramps caused by the ADA is really that great, you'd think more ramp contractors would have shown up to at least partially offset the increased demand.
Yeah, sure. Doctors are in high demand but we don't see more of them. Regulations come with a dark hand of evil: licensing. Good luck trying to overcome the barrier to industry that government creates. Want to make ramps? Get licensed. Want to get licensed? Get in line.
?" The whole idea behind disability-law reform is to allow people to move and live independently, not at the mercy (i.e. pity) of bouncers (or relatives, or anyone else). If disabled customers can't get into a business without begging for help, and the business refuses to upgrade accordingly, the business should be shut down.
Yet this bar was in business for 20 years and they did fine with their disabled customers. It was only once they had to "comply" that they got shut down -- losing all their customers.
How about forcing men's clothing stores to sell women's clothing, too? How about we get toupee stores to also carry items for those with hair? How about we force lingerie stores to carry sexy clothing for the grossly obese? Why not force Christian book stores to carry secular items?
Businesses start to focus on a particular group of people. My skateboad shops had to meet ADA compliance in the bathrooms -- $5000 a piece in added cost. Over 4 years I never had ONE person in a wheelchair come in. Oh, and I had to have 3 handicapped parking spaces out of the 7 I was allotted. Guess how many people used it? Just my handicapped brother-in-law, once in 4 years. He LIVED in the town my store was in and never visited.
These regulations are ridiculous. Pity? No, people help the disabled out of concern and out of profit-motives. If a bar doesn't want to help a wheelchair bound person come into their business, the wheelchair bound person is free to tell others online, and I bet anything the bar would come under a lot of criticism.
Shutting them down for refusing to pay $150,000 for an elevator is crazy. Or they could make their $1 beer into a $4 beer and hope that 50,000 people will be happy to pay for it.
I was recently in China. One of the hotels I stayed in happened to have a neat little feature for the elevator buttons. If you accidently hit one you can double tap it to turn it off. Endless seconds of enjoyment followed hitting all the buttons and then turning them off.
...it can't be more than about 20 floors. Not sure why you would need such a fancy elevator in such a short building.
http://archrecord.construction.com/innovation/4_Pr oducts/0411ProductFeature.asp
Abuse my rationalization of rhetoric as either metaphor or monotomy.
This may sound totally bizarre or even racial but I noticed one thing in my building in NYC that is very bizarre. The african american tenants 9 times out of 10 will push both the up and down button to just go one direction and then it comes and we get in and it has to reset itself when know one goes in the direction it stops for. I have never seen another race do this in my experience.
It is one of the most bizarre social/cultural observations I have made in NYC.
Wonder why?
An obvious "improvement" is the addition of a VIP button, card, or code that allows some people priority, VIP access to the elevators.
While the regular joes may find this annoying, a building manager may like it because it can reduce the bulk and expense for special penthouse elevators.
It may even allow them to bill an extra $25.00 per month for VIP access in rent, or setup a pay per use service.
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
"why aren't we moving?" "elevator crashed again."
There are no uninteresting things. There are only uninterested people.
As someone who works in that experimental building, I can tell you the experiment doesn't seem to be going all that well. 1. It appears to take longer to get an elevator from the lobby, and once in, the car makes more stops at floors for which there are no passengers than it does the needed floors. 2. Admittedly, the wait for an elevator from a non-lobby floor seems shorter, but it also appears to make more stops once boarded than beforethis the opposite of the claim the wait for an elevator will be longer, and the ride shorter. So far...well...this thing isn't living up to the promise.
This sounds like another high tech effort to solve a problem which really isn't a big problem. There are probably many large buildings where a system like this makes sense, but from personal experience I know that this tech sometimes causes more headaches than it solves.
In the late 1990s, I worked at the AAAS building in Washington, DC. AAAS is the publisher of Science magazine, which most of you have heard about. The AAAS headquarters building is this sleek 12-story high tech edifice designed by famous architect I.M. Pei. It was built it the mid-90s and it features a smart elevator system which requires that people select their floor and then the elevator bunches people up for rides.
The elevator system was pretty cool, but the "smart" system wasn't so smart. Over several years of operation it became obvious to the staff that the elevator system was contributing to a dysfunctional organizational culture. People in different departments on different weren't interacting in the same way they would if they had been randomly grouped together for "inefficient" elevator rides. There were two bunches of three floors which had an atrium with an open staircase, but the building also discouraged using the stairs between floors because of security reasons. We were always rescuing people who couldn't get out of the stairways.
The joke became that the only time the staff in the association mingled was at Christmas parties and at the annual meeting. The smart elevator system actually worked against people in the organization getting to know each other through casual and chance elevator encounters. The "smart" elevator did a good job of putting co-workers together for rides to the same floor, but it also worked against social cohesion in the organization.
read this book.(no I am not getting a referral off this...)
that and John Nash's thesis will tell you why this will never happen (or rather, will always happen.)
All "enlightened" political systems are conceived with the idea of being equitable, (or at least "just") but they all fall down as soon as some @#$%^@ figures out how to cheat the system. (i.e. the totalitarian.) The interesting part to me is not that it happens, but that it happens repeatedly. "Those who forget the past..." etc. etc..
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
Here is just another example of technology "putting the blinders on" users and sheltering them from life, sure you might have to put up with the smelly old guy who asks, "how's it hangin young feller?" just to ride the normal elevator that everybody rides, but that might just be the social interaction we geeks need to "break the ice." If things much smarter, you will be told who to date, like it or not....
Or take the freaking stairs, you will be buff soon enuff, then the redhead from the mailroom might think you got it goin' on!
Do you like pie?
Sig Hansen?
But guess what, so do labor protections, environmental protections, S-OX, food and drug regulations, and just about every other regulation. Yes. Regulation increases the cost of business. I'm not going to cry about that. It's the cost of a better society. I understand you don't agree. Luckily there's more people who agree with me than you.
But the point is that government should guide the majority, not inconvenience everybody. I am for regulations for standards in food handling, labor protection, and environmental regulations. Everybody benefits from those.
A better society does not need rules to "help" those with disabilities. A better society would just help those out, and they do it all the time anyway. Ever seen a blind person bump into somebody? Even if the other person is standing still, and not in the way, they apologize to the blind person like its their fault for standing there and then they are likely to guide the blind person in the right direction if they don't know where to go.
Why the fuck is there braille stuff everywhere? Sign manufactures must learn braille and make a separate manufacturing process to stamp the bumps. I have never seen, or heard of a blind person walking down hallways and feeling every inch of the walls to figure out where to go. That is stupid. They get somebody to guide them for free, and then they learn where to go after that.
Talk to me when they can go sideways, respond to commands like "Main Engineering" and - when you're the senior person in the building and you're trapped in the lift - you can control the entire building from one tiny control panel simply by saying something along the lines of "Reroute building control to this panel, authorisation code Picard-1234-02-Omega-09-Theta".
:)
Yeah, they'll be a lot keener to rescue you from the trapped lift when you're in a really bad mood and controlling the air-conditioning
This is something simple and very informative to the riders without requiring much sophistication, in terms of renovation. You still won't know how long you have to wait, but at least you know which elevator you should be waiting for.
This is the whole *problem* with your anti-regulatory logic. In many settings the disabled are not enough of a presence to make a real dent in the market... yet, unlike other market participants, they can't just go and change the conditions that are causing the market not to serve them.
In the transit case, it was *not* the market but the ADA, through lawsuits, that prompted the changes. A market solution would have had disabled people who needed to get somewhere begging for charity as they had for the previous hundred years, because transportation for the disabled is expensive, disabled people tend to be poor, and the market just won't support private services. In contrast, once there was an ADA, within a decade there was a revolution in urban transportation (at least in the more progressive markets) for disabled riders. I am happy to pay a few more bucks in taxes to have a disability-friendly transportation network so people can get around with independence and dignity.
Businesses start to focus on a particular group of people.
Yes, they should. Again, the disabled, unlike secular bookbuyers, people with hair, or fat people, are not going to be served naturally by the market -- exactly because of the reasons you describe. They are not that numerous and it is expensive to serve them. Our choice as a society is to marginalize them in the name of market logic or to spend a little collective money to ensure they can live under the same conditions as everyone else.
This is not to say the current system is entirely fair. Small businesses facing unreasonable costs to achieve ADA compliance should be offered partial subsidies, so they don't bear a disproportionate burden. Still, what kind of 2-story elevator would have cost $150k? One with gold doors? And why would you need a special license under the ADA to build a ramp? Yes, you need a contractor license, but you needed that anyway. Your examples are fishy because you're starting with an ideological agenda instead of the facts.
company i worked for years back got sick of everyone complaining about the wait for an elevator (two only in large old building) - the company priced retrofitting building & was quoted something in the millions (structural changes to building needed). someone mentioned having heard the idea of sticking full-length mirrors beside the elevator doors - people tend to spend time checking out how they look (or how the person next to them looks) & the *subjective* wait becomes much shorter. sure enough, less complaints about the wait after the mirrors were installed.
this 'smart elevator' thing sounds like the reverse - it actually *increases* the wait time; most people experience being *in* the elevator as actually going somewhere and hence less annoying than waiting for an elevator to show up in the first place. can't see it catching on.
Our company has had this technology installed in our building for over 2 years.
"Your having a bad day when the voices in your head put you on hold"
And if one person blocks the doors on one elevator, everyone gets totally screwed. Other than that...
Even better though, what if you could set it up so that it ran continuously at the same average speed? You'd eliminate a lot of the complexities. Oh, that's right - its called an escalator, and we don't use them because while they move masses of people pretty efficiently, they're very slow when it comes to moving a few people, oh, 50 floors at a time.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
The new system uses touchpanels to group users by destination.
Damn, here I was hoping the elevator would actually speak and ask me "Where do you want to go today?"
But then, do I want the elvator controlled by an OS synonymous with the word "crash"?
That's a waste of dings. Every floor should ding in Morse code. You would only need 5-10 dings per floor (assuming 100 floors) and at the 40th floor you would have only heard 591 ding/dashes.
...
But man would that be annoying....
How about bing/bong binary? bong, bing, bing-bong, bing-bing, bing-bong-bong,
Like puzzle games? Warehouse51 for iOS
me up, Scotty!
...
nevermind
A similar system was installed at one of my company's buildings 4 years ago. "Similar" because it requires all riders to enter their floor number, then groups them together as efficiently as possible. The system does lack the predictive functionality of this new "smart elevator".
Reactions to the elevators have been a lot different than the Marriott Marquis Times Square; people love the elevators and everyone is convinced that they are much faster.
Ceri
I'd settle for seeing elevators in two-story buildings NOT having a button to select which floor to go to...
And if there are no blind people that happen to be riding at the time, what's so bad about having a mute button you can use in that case?
That way you can have your cellphone conversation without being disturbed.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
My friend's RX-8 has a digital speedometer, and it is neither hard to read, nor goofy. In fact it is much easier and faster to read, and see when you are in the triple digits.
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
I guess if you are blind and the hallway is empty you are just plain screwed huh?
I mean seriously if the bathroom signs and office number signs all have braile on them wouldn't the cost to put braile on something go way down eventually as everyone making signs would be providing it?
Same thing with an elevator - oops no one else is on this elevator and you took my braile off the button and my dings off the door opening. First problem is this going up or down? hmm I guess I can figure that out once I get on and it moves. Then I can hit every button and count floors - sure that will work.
s/people/politicians/
Fixed that for you!
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
Sounds like a good example of a horribly over-engineered solution to a simple problem. I'll just press the one button and wait, thanks.
Triple digits?!
I sure hope that is KPH!
5. BING muting. Have you been in these elevators that have to BING at every floor, even when you're going to the 33rd from the 1st? Yeesh, give me a mute button.
The dings aren't for you. Be glad that you can fucking see.
How is a blind person supposed to know what floor the elevator is at with one ding for every floor?
High pitched DING = one floor
Medium pitched DANG = five floors
Low pitched DONG = ten floors
So the 33rd floor is DONG DONG DONG DING DING DING, the 38th floor is DONG DONG DONG DANG DING DING DING, etc...
Okay, maybe that method sucks too.
This is a classic example of trading off latency for throughput.
The buffering they use means that the waiting time for each user to get served (latency) is increased, but the total transaction time decreases due to the buffering, which makes the input traffic pattern less "random".
Hasan
Given that people don't wait for a two-state system to cycle to their state, why are they going to wait for a $floor_count state system?
Considering that all the elevators in any given building will be using this system, the lazy, retrograde complainers will have no choice but to adapt to the new system or learn how to climb the stairs.
It's time we ignore the fussy ladies like the one mentioned in the article. If we sent her back in time, she would be complaining that she had to press any type of button instead of just instructing the elevator attendant to take her to her floor.
And oddly enough, if we sent this same lady far, far into the future when elevators are controlled by speech, she probably would refuse to talk to it too. People. They're the worst.
Since each car is runs indpenendently there would need to safe guards that keep cars from hitting each other. If someone blocks the door open the other cars would have to halt and if needed open on other floors. Almost same problem with a standard elevator. Of course if you had multiple shafts and the cars had the ability to move between shafts they could just move around the blocking car.
OK, it's not fair, because that lift only has 3 stops.
It sounds like a silly system. When I get to work, and there's a large gaggle of people waiting for an elevator, I wait and get the second or third one to come down, and let the first one down fill with lots of people. Chances are, by the second or third elevator that manages to come down (assuming there is enough time between when the bulk of riders gets on the first car), there is maybe 3 or 5 people on my lift, and I get to my floor faster because I have to stop at max 5 other floors, instead of potentially max myfloor (I was working on 13th floor) stops.
I first read it as "Space elevators coming to Seattle". :P
My office building has it since last summer, thats july 2005 (I work for a bank that owns a whole 16 floor bulding). It's an Otis System, there is a 'pedestal' on each floor where you enter your destination floor, there are 5 leter-labeled elevators (A to E), the 'pedestal' asigns you to a particular elevator. Each elevator has an indicator for wich floors is headed, inside there are only tree buttons: emergency, close and open door. It all works nice but I remember 2 times (in the fist month) where the whole sistem was down, it was chaos, I has been ok since then. There are also another 2 'regular' elevators between the lobby and the 4 basement levels (parking).
16,777,216 comments ought to be enough for any forum!
...welcome our new intelligent up/down overlords.
The mariott (?) hotel in NYC on times square has had this tech since summer of 2004. It isnt all that bad, the only problem belies when the confused tourists start looking for their elevator.
:).
I do however that this system is quite ingenious and efficient, if coupled with multiple elevator zones, such as those employed by the mariott (express elevator to upper 20% of building, express to lower, express to top floor/restaurant...etc).
Again the only problem with it is that there was no touchpad IN the elevator itself, only the emergency buttons and open/close door buttons. I am not quiite sure how firefighters are to us this particular model to get to the desired floor.
As for this article, i think fuji is just looking for some free press
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
to just take the stairs?
After all most americans need more exercise.
Unless you are disabled, carrying a lot of stuff or its a really tall building.
I know of the one youre talking about. It is nifty, but everyone keeps going to the 45th floor to get a cheep view of the square. Nice hotel though.
Since Hong Kong has the largest number of tall buildings, I suppose this is kind of obvious. But we already have elevators which ask for your destination before getting in (such as "Exchange Square" Towers 1, 2 and 3)
We also have double decker elevators in buildings such as "2 IFC".
Of course, we also have some ridiculously stupid elevators, such as the one in the building where I work. There are two lifts servicing each floor, however, they are totally independant of each other.. the result? if you want a lift you always press BOTH buttons.. needless to say, this results in a lot of wasted trips for the lift.
While we're on the topic, why don't more lifts "auto-home" (return to the first floor) and keep their doors open? -- I hate walking into smelly lifts..
just my 2 HK cents.
I say we should stick with English. English is the second-most common language in the world and the most commonly understood language internationally. As a previous poster said, many people who don't speak English can understand numerals. Also, despite what is being drilled into our kids' heads lately, it is the official language of the United States.
Voice synthesizers are commonplace, reliable, and cheap. Surely you've seen the occasional child's toy with a built in bank of digitized responses. Yeah, those can be easily made to speak numerals, i think they even sell that chip at RS.
Yes, blind folks are important and need to know what floor they're on. Surely 'Floor Two-Seven' is much easier for everyone to understand than 'dingdingdingdingdingdingdingdingdingdingdingding
Lets move to a more user-friendly system rather than sticking to the status quo, kk?
Yes but a phrase is a phrase in any language. Instead of counting dings, you count phrases (which are numbers for that floor). That way blind people who actually speak the language will understand while those who don't will just count. BTW: how likely is it that a blind person wouldnt speak the local language? as if life wasnt hard enough already.
Shouldn't #6 from the first link ("If You Weren't Disabled Before...") be covered under ex post facto laws in Sections 9 & 10 of Article 1 of the Constitution?
I work in the building, so I have some first hand experiences... 1. They have been installing the upgrades for about 2 years, so we have had 1-3 elevators out of 5 not working. 2. It's been bad for so long, it hard to tell any "real" improvement. 3. During "light" times, it's a better experience. 4. It tells you what door you need to stand in front of. 5. You can NOT "jump in" an up elevator then select your floor. The floor selection buttons do not work inside the elevator. 6. occasional visitor are totally confused. They call on their cell from the lobby and ask directions. 7. It's just different. Better? Depends on your definition.
They told me it would never happen -- elevators would always be as they were. I guess he was mostly right, since it is now 10 years later...
Right, because 10 years almost equals never.
The U.S must be really behind.
In Malaysia, I used a lift where you can double press a floor button to cancel it.
Also, in Hong Kong, I've already used lifts where you press your destination from outside the lift.
My building in SF has had this functionality for more than a year already. I guess now it's important enough for a /. article. Go figure. I will say this... It works, and works well from an efficiency front. But make no mistake, every single person that uses the system for the first time has no freakin' idea how to run the thing. It just flat out confuses the hell out of people. Once they use it, then it works no problem from that point forward. Also, sometimes, some funny shit happens like you enter your number, then get on the wrong elevator because more than one comes and you don't look for the one you're supposed to get into. Then, you get stuck in the freakin' elevator on some random floor with no way out until it starts moving again because there are no buttons inside of the damn thing. LOL, some funny shit!
My wife and I had the misfortune of staying in the Marquis last March...at the same time (unbeknownst to us) as some African-American sorority was holding its national alumni conference, AND the same time as some national junior-high cheerleading convention.
The hotel lobby was under "renovation" (read: destroyed), and they had just installed this newfangled elevator control system for 7 of the eight elevators in the atrium tower. You punch your desired floor into the external keypad and after a few seconds it flashes the car you should wait for (this is when it was working "properly," and not just displaying XXX after any entry). Needless to say, this was an unmitigated disaster...I mean a bona fide clusterfuck.
We were up around the 25th floor or so, and I have NEVER had to wait so long for an elevator to come to my floor to carry me down. Several times the wait was in excess of 5 minutes, and once it took more than 10. We had the best success riding in the ONE elevator car that still contained a traditional control panel and was staffed by a hotel employee.
Though this was not the only reason we will never stay in the Marriott Marquis again, it was a considerable contributing factor.
My work has elevators that tell sense if you're standing close to the doors as they close and then say in a smooth male voice "Please stand clear, of the closing doors" (yes there's a comma there; no it doesn't make sense). The thing is it says this after the doors have closed. It's just creepy.
A couple of weeks ago, in one of the elevators, the little LCD screen that shows you what the elevator's doing and how cool the building is just had Windows 95/8 desktops showing. I nearly got back out before realising it was *just the screen* that was running that sh*t. I've been stuck in those elevators before...
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will! - Antonio Gramsci.
Get into an elevator then press all the buttons anyhow and say "ha ha". Maybe if you hit a floor that the elevator isn't supposed to go to, it beeps or shocks the user. Now if only we can get the slow idiots out of the left lane on the highway.
They already do this - or at least, some of them do. The elevators in my building alert you before the actual arival.
Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, which is why engineers sometimes smell really bad.
So you are part of the "majority wins, minorities eat it" crowd? I hate to break reality to you, but while you seem willing to help and employ people with disabilities, not everyone is so kind hearted. Such as the time I saw a blind man attempting to cross a street and got off course and just about killed when the light changed and instead of someone assisting the man, they just raced off the line taking the *cane* out of his hand when they clipped it. Or the many horn honking engine revving idiots when a wheelchair isn't getting out of the intersection in time... while pedestrians walk right by the struggling chair user.
Inside buildings it isn't much better, with people stampede out of elevator shafts and showing *none* of the concern for the blind potential passenger. I say potential because after they stampede out, a stampede goes in, leaving the blind man in the dust.
Perhaps these problems are unique to our snowbird + college student landscape here and you live somewhere that has fluffy bunnies and rainbows are forever in the sky. Or perhaps you simply choose to see your kindness as all encompassing. It isn't, and I get so infuriated with the way people treat others that it hurts. Yet... you suggest that the things that help the disabled be *self sufficient* (when clearly the people around them aren't interested in bearing the burden of even a second's courtesy) should not exist because "it inconveniences everyone".
So, when you figure out how the heck to form a "better society", could you notify the rest of the world so they could suddenly take others into consideration instead of existing in their self absorbed world? In the meantime, could you *stop* attempting to pretend that a few bumps on a sign somehow injures you? The blind that *I* knew in the college environment were *very* dependent upon the accommodations that were made, and when they had to enter a legacy building without such accommodations they had great difficulty making it to classes: to the point where they would cancel the class and hope it would be rescheduled somewhere they could get. Because the classmates had better things to do than "walk the gimp" (actual quote) to class.
Sig under construction since 1998.
So you are part of the "majority wins, minorities eat it" crowd?
Majority always wins.
Such as the time I saw a blind man attempting to cross a street and got off course and just about killed when the light changed and instead of someone assisting the man, they just raced off the line taking the *cane* out of his hand when they clipped it.
What? I have never heard of such a thing. Where on Earth do you live? I'm guessing one of the top 10 populated cities in the US. I would suggest moving where people are more kind. Why would anybody want to be associated with assholes like that? Wow.
Or the many horn honking engine revving idiots when a wheelchair isn't getting out of the intersection in time... while pedestrians walk right by the struggling chair user.
Example #2 that you are living in the wrong place. The only people I am impatient with on the road are old people that drive slowly*, and dumbasses that can't figure out how to drive and talk on the phone at the same time.
Inside buildings it isn't much better, with people stampede out of elevator shafts and showing *none* of the concern for the blind potential passenger. I say potential because after they stampede out, a stampede goes in, leaving the blind man in the dust.
Example #3. Move
I get so infuriated with the way people treat others that it hurts. Yet... you suggest that the things that help the disabled be *self sufficient* (when clearly the people around them aren't interested in bearing the burden of even a second's courtesy) should not exist because "it inconveniences everyone".
Fight back with random acts of kindness. A friend owes me $300 from back rent over 6 months, and does not call or come by anymore. He sucks with money. I told him what I do, but he is used to fucking up. I'm coming into about $40k from a real estate sale (why someone would pay 1/2mil for my $160k house is beyond me), and I'm going to buy him a car because his got repoed. I found a 4 door car today with a list price of $6.9. I asked if I could get it for $6k, and the sales guy asked what I wanted to do about the taxes titles and other fees. I said, "nothing". My friend should be able to drive out of the place with a 2000 4 door import.
Yet... you suggest that the things that help the disabled be *self sufficient* (when clearly the people around them aren't interested in bearing the burden of even a second's courtesy) should not exist because "it inconveniences everyone".
Hate crimes are already on the books. Call the cops.
Nobody is self sufficient. I never suggested that the wheelchair bound person cut down a tree in his backyard and make himself a wheelchair. If the person is not going to help other people out by working and going out in the world, why does he need a wheelchair anyway?
I just found out last night that my worthless wheelchair bound cousin now is asking his sister for money to get his electricity turned back on. He does not deserve a wheelchair or electricity. He sucks. He does nothing for people, but takes from me and you with our social security, his overpriced almost $2.5k wheelchair that we gave him, and he refuses to do anything. Fuck him. What difference would it make if he just died?
"it inconveniences everyone"
So, what is your suggestion for the wheelchair bound people and blind people in your town?
I guess we could all get together and pay tons of money to install drop down gates at all of the intersections and elevator doors like that have at railroad crossings.
*old people suck. Eskimos ask them to take a nap on the snow when they eat more food than they are worth.
I was going to respond, but with "Fuck him. What difference would it make if he just died?" it is quite clear where you stand. In your original post you proposed that people being nice was the answer, and yet you make it clear that the help your have given has turned to venomous distain for how people have reacted to that help. Newsflash: societal drains don't have to be disabled (just ask my brother in law and my parents).
No, I suspect placing an auditory clue on intersections that helps the blind avoid being off course would be "too much" help. Creating median islands with walk buttons in large intersections for slow walkers and wheelchairs is just a burden that can't be contemplated. "Fuck [them]. What difference would it make if [they] just died?" seems to be my towns attitude already: are you our civic planner?
Sig under construction since 1998.
My building here in Portland recently upgraded to these "smart elevators". They are not so smart. They go to random floors all the time, sit for absurdly long times at floors (or close the door before you can get in)-- all random. It was better with the old ones.
They already exist but they're being phased out because they're not safe :)
Just this weekend I stayed in a hotel in Prague that announced the floors only in English. Granted, most everyone I encountered while I was there spoke at least some English, but this elevator was a strange thing to hear in a primarily non-English-speaking country.
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