The elevator in my apartment block has the floor numbers organised in two columns but they read from right to left. It goes:
12|11
10|9
8|7
6|5
4|3
2|1
0|-1
Just a silly mistake I guess, but it annoys every time I look at it.
The one that was recently built at my workplace easily takes the cake, however. Two columns again but this time it’s:
23|43
22|42
21|41
20|T
-1|40
-2|30
There’s actually some sort of logic behind it, in that the elevator connects two buildings that were once separate and actually built at different times, by different teams, for different customers and purposes. Our original building is number 2, then we bought the one right next to it, number 4, so the scheme is e.g. “21” = Building 2, Floor 1, “43” = Building 4, Floor 3 and so on. So, it sort of makes sense.
Yet, the first time I took the elevator, I looked at the panel and, although I had worked there for 12 years , I had absolutely no idea which button to press to get where I wanted. I’ve used it about 20 times now (I usually take the stairs anyway) but the scheme still gives me pause and I get the floor wrong pretty often. “T” and “30” still completely mystify me.
Oh, and we also bought a third building, number 6, but fortunately, there’s no elevator there.
There’s a housing project near my neighborhood that consists of a bunch of apartment towers. Each is about 20 floors high, and has two elevators.
Some genius decided that to save money, one elevator would stop at the lobby plus all the odd floors, and the other elevator would stop at the lobby plus all the even floors. If you aren’t familiar with those buildings and don’t carefully read the sign, you could easily get on the wrong elevator.
And if one elevator is busted, half the residents are stuck having to go to the wrong floor and then taking the stairs up or down. And a lot of the people who live there are elderly.
The dumbest thing is that if you live on an odd floor and want to visit a friend on an even floor and don’t want to take the stairs, you have to go all the way down to the lobby, change elevators, and go back up.
Your title is about floor numbering but your text & replies are about elevators.
Around here they recently passed a law that the number 13 can no longer be skipped when numbering floors. Call it truth in labeling. There’s no requirement to renumber existing 13+ story buildings.
I regularly stay in a particular 20-ish story hotel. The rooms are numbered the typical way like xxyy where xx is the floor number (01 to 20) and yy is the room number (01 to 50-something). So far so good.
Then they built a second building about the same height attached by a narrow corridor on the ground level. Whose room numbers are 4xxy. Where xx & y have the same meaning as before. Fortunately there are only 9 rooms on each floor in the outbuilding.
Over the years I’ve seen a lot of wacky numbering schemes in sprawling multi-building low-rise hotels. But this particular combo is as jarring as the OP’s second example. Bonus points for it being a public building where the vast majority of building users are first time visitors totally unfamiliar with it.
College libraries, especially those built long ago, have some of the most confusing floor naming systems around. The Baker-Berry library at Dartmouth is the worst I’ve ever used in terms of its floor layout. Check out the floor guide.
Well, for weird floorplans, at the Rye Brook Hilton, the 4th and 7th floors were on the same level. You could walk from one to another without going up or down stairs (they may have renumbered it in the past few years). It got the nickname “Escher Hilton.”
Here’s a 3D model. The top floor on the right is the 4th and you can see the path to the 7th on the right.
Our college has some very confusing room numbering. In one building, they start with the lowest and highest room number across from each other. The numbers increase on the right and decrease on the left. In another, you enter on the second floor.
How much money would that even save, I wonder. It’s not like the even elevator doesn’t exist on the odd floors. The shaft is there, the elevator is there, all that’s missing is a door to let you on or off. How much do 20 elevator doors cost?
In the building where I work, the main entrance is on the 5th floor. You walk into the lobby and into the bank of elevators right there, and you see that you’re on 5, and the elevator only goes up. You get used to it when you go there regularly, but it’s confusing for newcomers and visitors.
The building is on a hill and floors 1 through 4 are underneath on one side, accessible only from the parking garage and a secondary entrance off on a side-street down on the first floor. Not all elevators (or stairwells) go to these lowest floors, so if for some reason you need to go from, say, 7 to 4, you have to go down to 5, get off and cross the atrium to the bank of elevators on the far side that only go to the lowest levels.
Rather than being for saving money, the actual reason is probably to improve performance when there’s lots of traffic. Each elevator is in effect servicing a 10-story building. So there’s half as much opportunity for it to stop along the way between wherever you are and wherever you’re going.
The DoubleTree in Breckenridge has a similar elevator scheme as it is also on a hillside. Its entry level is level 3, and the elevators there only go to level 7. To get to levels 8-10 you have to walk through half the hotel to another set of elevators to get you the rest of the way.
Interesting idea, but I’m not certain if it would really work. I mean, if each elevator only serves 10 floors, they might make more trips then if they had to serve all 20. But suppose I live on the 19th floor. I leave my apartment and walk to the elevator; rather than get on whichever elevator comes first, I have to wait for the one elevator that serves the odd floors. I might spend more time waiting for the elevator, and less time in it; but the time from my door to the lobby may be just as long.
It would be an interesting situation to model.
Good thing it’s a hotel. No one ever has to carry big, bulky objects when they go to a hotel.
I dunno. The typical way to do that is to have one elevator serve the bottom half of the building and the other elevator serve the top half. That has the additional benefit of saving shaft space in the top half of the building.
My theory is that they originally designed the buildings to have two full elevator shafts, and the odd/even thing was shoehorned in at the last minute.
The worst hotel floor plan I’ve seen was somewhere I stayed a few years ago on a business trip. It was one of the lesser-known resorts in Vegas but I forget exactly which one. The front desk clerk gave me a map, marked the path to my room and explained it, and I still got lost and had to ask someone for directions half way. It went something like this:
down a hallway, ignoring a bank of elevators I passed
turn right, down another shorter hallway
take the elevator there up 3 floors
down a hallway, turn left
down a hallway, up a ramp
down a hallway, turn left again, ignoring another bank of elevators
turn right, go down some stairs
down a hallway, turn right
take the elevator there to the 7th floor
down a hallway, go through some fire doors
viola! home sweet home!
I curious about the history of these buildings. In “The Gas Pipe Networks” by Louis M. Bloch, Jr., he writes about a New York City building he lived in during the early forties:
[QUOTE=Louis M. Bloch, Jr.]
International House, as I mentioned, is a twelve story building with six stories reserved for men and six floors for women. The men’s floors were even numbered while the women had the odd numbered floors. Elevators at each end of the building served respectively, men and women. The downstairs consisted of common rooms… The administrative staff was rigid, and I must say effective in keeping the living quarters separate."
[/quote]
