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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."
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.
Human nature I suppose.
crazy dynamite monkey
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.
God I hate it when people try to program machines to be nice! The example that sticks out in my mind is the stupid self serve checkouts that have popped up all over the place here. They try to talk you through using them. They have the most annoying computer generated voice that says things like "Please rescan item." .... Cut the chit chat! Don't try to make machines nice just make a green light and a bell that goes "ding" when an item has been scanned.
7. A button to temporarily override that godawful buzzing sound if the door is left open too long.
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.
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.
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?
Let me guess...those who stopped complaining must have been identified as being more "self-absorbed" than those who kept complaining.
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.
It's stupid in that it doesn't take into account user stupidity.
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.
Let me guess: you're an engineer or programmer, right?
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.
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