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Elevators haven't changed much in 150 years; the controls got more sophisticated, but they basically remained a box pulled up by a cable, with one cab per shaft. This becomes a real problem as buildings get taller; the multiple shafts end up taking up a lot of valuable real estate, with only one little box in each. The cables get so heavy that you end up spending more energy moving cables than cab. As the buildings sway, the cables start swaying too. The elevators end up being a real limiting factor on the height of our buildings and the density of our cities, and a big factor in the high cost of high buildings.
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Last year, ThyssenKrupp announced a solution to this problem: the MULTI lift system which gets rid of elevator cables, and instead runs each elevator cab as an independent vehicle on a vertical track, powered by linear induction motors. Because there were no cables, it meant that they could put more than one car in every shaft. In fact, they could put a continuous stream of them in.
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And move it does, in the most remarkable ways, unlike any elevator ever built. The cabs rise up on the tracks, powered by the linear induction motors; when they reach the end, top, bottom or any point where they want to move sideways, a section of track rotates and the cab goes sideways.
Two words: motion sickness.
(Score: 1) by DutchUncle on Monday November 09 2015, @03:42PM
Nobody is suggesting making all of Texas as dense as NYC. The suggestion is that spreading a city's worth of population one story thin (like buttter scraped over too much bread) takes a lot of space, and a lot of roads, and causes a lot of transportation overhead for the most basic things like distributing food and getting to work. And when things are too spread out, "mass transit" becomes a misnomer, even if we expect self-driving taxicabs soon. Part of the problem is that rural and suburban people equate density with poverty and squalor. We should be looking for economical AND sociological/psychological balance between *moderate* density (like older parts of NYC), and having enough volume per person/family to be comfortable, at reasonable prices. We want population dense enough to achieve critical mass for activities and interactions, and efficiency, while giving people enough space so they don't feel compressed. The best way to do that is to build vertically.
(Score: 1) by Osamabobama on Monday November 09 2015, @07:34PM
One interesting example of how population density makes some amenities possible is a cruise ship. I understand that they have some pretty good stuff going on for their guests, attractions that would be unaffordable without a lot of people nearby.
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