Imagine 5 groups of people, each group going to a particular floor.
If some of each group got into each of 5 elevators, each elevator would have to stop at each of the 5 floors.
If each of the 5 groups gets their own elevator, then each elevator would only stop at one floor, zipping past the other floors.
Every elevator becomes an express elevator
Adding low floors can be grouped together, so that elevator can be available much quicker for the next ride.
Douglas Adams:
“Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and 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 squatting in basements sulking.”
Just missed being post 42…
And apparently missed post 38.
Lots of elevators in Jakarta work like this, or some variation. It can indeed be a problem.
I once had to go to meetings in a building where the system was that you told the receptionist in the lobby where you were going, and she issued you a RFID passkey that would tell the elevator to take you to the correct floor. Silly me, about the third time I went there, instead of saying the office I confidently said “5th floor” and got a pass for the 5th floor.
You can guess how well that turned out.
It made me bonkers in my ortho’s building when I was on crutches and just plain couldn’t make it to the elevator by the time the door closed.
Lots of buildings in NYC have these and they work extremely well.
The reason why is obvious. It is faster to run one elevator car with 10 people to a small group of floors than to 10 different floors. Likewise, it is more efficient to put people traveling to the same floor into the same elevator instead of spread amongst multiple elevators.
By having passengers select their floor before boarding, the system can easily sort people going to the same or nearby floors into the same car. The result is that elevators can transport more people in less time, because they make fewer stops each way. That means more trips per car, less wait time for passengers, and less energy used.
You went to the fifth floor as requested?
Another useful way to think about why this is faster is to consider a transportation network that already does intelligent routing, and revert it to the old dumb elevator algorithm, where you just get into the first thing that comes along.
Uber (and others) have shared-car options where a group of people going from a similar location to another similar location share a car. This is efficient because the system knows that everyone’s destination is close, so there won’t be a lot of wasted time at either end.
Imagine if they didn’t pay any attention to the destination when assigning you a car. You’d just get in whatever car was closest to you and it would drive all over the damned place getting people to their different destinations. Terribly inefficient.
Obviously, since elevators only travel in one dimension, the efficiency improvements are not as big as on a 2d surface, but they are still substantial.
I’m assuming the problem is that the office was no longer on the fifth floor, or never was and you misremembered?
But that’s not really a problem with this system. It’s a problem with not knowing where you’re going. An old dumb traditional elevator with buttons would have also taken you to the 5th floor, because you’d have pressed the 5 button, right?
Indeed I did. Now assume, for the sake of argument, that my confidence in my ability to remember which floor # I needed to visit was misplaced.