Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday August 09 2017, @05:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the wonkavator dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

In the 160 or so years since the first skyscrapers were built, technological innovations of many kinds have allowed us to build them to reach astonishing heights. Today there is a 1,000-meter (167-story) building under construction in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Even taller buildings are possible with today's structural technology.

But people still don't really live in skyscrapers the way futurists had envisioned, for one reason: Elevators go only up and down. In the "Harry Potter" movies, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and others, we see cableless boxes that can travel not just vertically but horizontally and even diagonally. Today, that future might be closer than ever. A new system invented and being tested by German elevator producer ThyssenKrupp would get rid of cables altogether and build elevators more like magnetic levitation trains, which are common in Japan and China.

Source: https://phys.org/news/2017-08-reengineering-elevators-21st-century-cities.html


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @09:47PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @09:47PM (#551320)

    I make the same assumption. However, some athletes are able [dailymail.co.uk] to run 2 miles in under 10 minutes. It would be fair to compare that with travel via stairs. A study [springer.com] of people "with an average age of 23.4 years" (supposedly representative of the general population in South Korea) found that

    The average descent speed for the male and female population was 0.83 m/s and 0.74 m/s, respectively, while the average ascent speed was 0.66 m/s and 0.48 m/s.

    That's for 50 storeys of stairs; for the first 20 storeys, ascents were consistently faster by about 60%. Assuming 200 feet is about 20 storeys and is about 61 m, an average female college student could be expected to ascend the distance in 79 seconds: (160% / 100%) * (60.96 m) / (0.48 m/s). Ascents, surprisingly, could be slightly faster (I'm going by what the abstract says) at around 82 seconds: (60.96 m) / (0.74 m/s). Men are faster.

    I don't suppose the poster runs to the gym, but instead takes a private car. The great-great-grandparent post [soylentnews.org] asserted that high-rises are "inefficient." The comparison of a private car to an elevator is a fair one, although an elevator is more like mass transit because it's shared. The use of people's time is certainly a form of efficiency. Other obvious forms are the use of money, energy, land, and materials. In the design of the building where elevator trips took more than 10 minutes, travel time was obviously not the priority. Where it is, multiple, fast elevators are used. That takes more money, energy, land, and materials, but I would hazard a guess that it's still more efficient in all of those than having private cars for everyone and the attendant roads, parking and maintenance for them. I pose it as an either-or proposition because when people live in tower blocks, amenities such as a gym are often in the same building; a group of tower blocks can house enough people to justify a bus or train stop and/or a taxi stand; hence private cars are not a necessity. An elevator is egalitarian: it can be readily used by people who use wheelchairs, are blind, are otherwise in ill health (e.g. needing oxygen, subject to seizures or narcolepsy) or are very young or very old. Such people have difficulty driving cars. Having a car is a considerable expense; for people who work for their money, that means that they spend time working for money to buy, fuel/charge and maintain the car and a place to park it (whether in a garage or on the street). Mass transit in a suburb--where it exists at all--can be frustrating in the distance walked to a bus stop and the amount of time spent waiting for a bus.