I truly believe this feature on elevators is nothing but show. What does it do? It doesn’t close the doors any faster than if no button had been pressed other than the floor selected, so why is it there? Perhaps to ease the minds of stressed out passengers? Something along the lines of the placebo effect? If they THINK they have done something to speed things up, they will relax a bit and be more at ease? I don’t know but I am convinced it is useless for any reasons other than the possible psychological benefits extolled to the ones pressing it.
Not long ago I saw a documentary about elevators that confirmed your suspicion exactly. But more recently we had a thread on the topic that revealed that in some cases, they actually do work.
They worked on elevators I have ridden (and used the button).
It’s possible that buttons break, or are disabled in high traffic public areas (like malls) so that kids can’t fool around with them (or adults being rude to each other) and starting fights.
Not to doubt you, but how could you tell?
There are at least two elevators I use that I know they work on as well. I know because when I push the button, whether it has been as soon as I walk on or a few seconds later on whether it is before or after I hit the button for the floor I want, the doors immediately close. Also, it should be noted that both of these elevators are probably at least 30 years old and IIRC from something else I read here, that probably has something to do with it.
I saw an elevator in Montreal this weekend that worked - as soon as i got on the elevator I pressed it and it instantly closed, almost shutting out a man who was trying to get on (I hadn’t seen him).
I can at least say that though they may or may not work for normal operation, I have used several freight elevators that actually required their use and it is actually a useful feature.
In most cases I would get a key. Sometimes it simply lock and unlock the elevator, but sometimes it they had a manual mode so I wouldn’t need to keep the key on me the whole time. The doors need to stay open to allow me to put multiple items in the elevator, but if it just closed the doors and took me to the loading dock whenever a button was pressed, well, they get accidentally pressed often. Instead, holding the door close button a few seconds first would prevent that from happening unintentionally.
So, anyway, it’s entirely possible that, besides some of the other reasons listed in Cecil’s column, that it may or may not actually do anything in normal automatic mode.
I know of one elevator that has a working CLOSE DOORS button.
It’s in a medical complex, and the doors are set to operate very v e r y s l o w l y.
But if you push the button, they close right away.
Yeah, at the university where I work they work really well. If you don’t press the button you will actually be waiting 5 seconds or so, so most of the times the doors are closed by someone pressing the button. I agree that in many, many places they seem to do jack all. Just like the buttons at street crossings (which also seem to work very quickly in some cases by the way).
The elevator where I work has a close button that works. I know this because sadly I tested it one day when I was working late and there weren’t many people around. I timed how long it took for the doors to close on their own and then timed it after pressing the button.
Its the little things that make me happy.
Many elevators can be switched to a maintenance mode (usually with a key) where they’ll sit on a floor with doors open until you push and hold the close door button long enough for the doors to close completely. This is really handy if you’re moving a bunch of stuff via elevator and need longer than normal to get it all in/out.
Whether or not the button works on the elevators you have used does not mean they never work. At school, one of the teachers uses a cane to get around, the elevators are programmed to wait full 15 seconds until they close. Only by pressing close, do they close earlier.
I’ve always heard that it works in firefighter mode.
The close button works on most of the elevators I use here in Aomori. Not pressing the button necessitates a 3 second wait.
You have to press the button several times. As a matter of fact, all elevator buttons are like speed controls, the more times you push them, the faster it works.
In Asia IME all the close door elevator buttons work quite readily. I’ve given many a dirty look to some impatient cow who tried to close the elevator door while I was trying to get on, causing the door to knock into my shoulder.
I think the trick for that is to hold the floor number + the close door button for a couple seconds and it goes straight to that floor regardless of how many other floors are lit up. That’s what the Internet says anyway, I’ve never tried it (I don’t know why… I guess I always forget to when I’m alone in an elevator. I’m not that much of a dick that I’d do it with other people riding along).
Some certainly do, some don’t seem to. The one in the apartment building I’m in definitely does. I’ve been in many others that also close immediately when you push the close button.
When I was in high school, I volunteered at a hospital one summer for service hours. The elevators were slow and tended to stop at every floor for people getting on or off.
One day I was tagging along with one of the X-Ray transport guys and he showed me that if you held the button for the floor we were going to, the elevator wouldn’t stop for people on other floors who had pushed the elevator call button. I don’t know what would’ve happened if other buttons had been pressed inside the elevator, but when he had a patient in a bed on the elevator, there wasn’t much room for other passengers, so they did this so that it wouldn’t stop on every floor and have people trying to squeeze in.