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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

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 [treehugger.com]: 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.

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