There is constantly a need for more room in elevator cabins all over the world. Every morning, hundreds of thousands of businesspeople walk into their office buildings and need to quickly ascend to their floor. This is definitely an issue in large skyscrapers that house thousands and thousands of people consistently needing to ride the elevator. Luckily, in areas that need them, one company is considering a new innovation that may speed up the elevator problems.

An article in Business Standard talks about one company considering the development of double decker elevators that would be implemented in buildings with 30 floors or more. These elevators would initially be added to buildings in India – the inner workings would save a lot of time:

“Hyundai Elevator Company of Korea is initially targeting Mumbai and Gurgaon for the product, through its joint venture, Kinetic Hyundai Elevators and Movement Technologies, Pune. A double-deck elevator comprises two cars, one mounted atop the other. Both operate on a single shaft. This allows passengers on consecutive floors to use the elevator simultaneously. 

The lower car serves odd-numbered floors while the upper serves even-numbered ones. The double-deck could also be used to transport goods simultaneously with passengers.”

Aside from the time saving measures these elevators would add, they will actually occupy less room in skyscrapers, which allot a large amount of space for elevators normally. Surprisingly, double decker elevators also move significantly faster than standard lifts, adding more than 500 meters a minute to the speed.

The article says that no matter what the benefits of this elevators are, Hyundai Elevator Company is having some issues finding clients for the project, even with interest from Otis. However useful for businesses and office buildings, this type of elevator won’t be present in the residential elevator and home elevator market.

I’m constantly talking about elevators in this blog, but there is another very important mode of transportation for handicapped or otherwise incapacitated people – stairlifts. You probably see stairlifts all the time, especially in buildings with small flights of stairs – anywhere from 4 steps to a full flight of stairs. Many places like colleges, malls, hospitals and a host of other locations have stairlifts to aid those in wheelchairs move up and down floors where elevators aren’t available or are too short to require an elevator. Stairlifts operate in peoples’ homes as well, when those who utilize wheelchairs are rendered immobile by staircases inside and outside of homes.

In some areas, insurance companies work with clients to help pay for home stairlifts and in others, the local government actually pays entirely for the cost of a stairlift. This is the case in Oxfordshire County in England, but that may change after the summer – according to Banbury Cake:

“The authority pays the bill for the stairlifts, which are fitted in the homes of disabled people. But in a move it hopes will save it about £300,000 a year, it will shift responsibility for repairs and call outs for the equipment to the lift owners. Call-outs for repairs can cost up to £200 a time.”

Apparently this change will save the county council 300,000 pounds a year, which isn’t exactly a drop in the bucket in a tough economy. However, this is not the view of the stairlift owners, who are claiming victimization from the local government:

“Oxfordshire County Council said there are 793 people supported with the servicing and maintenance of stairlifts, a third more than in 2003 when there was 604. Now only the ‘most vulnerable’ will have their lifts paid for, but it was unable to define how many people would qualify.”

With an approximate upkeep cost of almost 300 pounds a year, do you think these citizens should have to pay for their stairlifts?

It is no secret that the economy has not been doing well over the last few years, but there are some fixes that there are no excuses for. Last year, in this blog, I wrote about a rather large amount of elevator and escalator problems that were occurring at subway stations all over the place. In many cases, incidents involving the trapping of riders and stalling of escalator stairs were rampantly pervasive in public transportation stations. Apparently, some places still haven’t found a way to remedy the situation.

Gothamist reports that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority hasn’t been able to make good on a 2007 project that aimed to fix elevator problems:

“…they’ve gotten a peek at the MTA inspector general’s report on a $2.7 million project started in 2007 that was meant to improve the maintenance and reliability of elevators and escalators. And it is a doozy. ‘Despite public concern, media attention and demands for improvement by the MTA Board, elevators and escalators remain a problem,’ the report says.”

Most concerning is the presence of false alarms and no alarms at all when actual problems occur inside the elevator shaft and chamber. The story says that the first half of 2010 saw more than 200 entrapments in elevators, a number that should be alarming to anyone who cannot use the stairs at these depots. Even worse is the response to problems when they arise:

“So instead workers simply wait ‘for notification from trapped riders or other transit workers before sending mechanics to the scene.’ And it turns out that monitoring equipment was disconnected at some elevators, ‘including some with the highest number of entrapments!’”

Thankfully, the MTA is making some improvements, like listing currently broken down elevators and escalators on its website. I think they should just focus on getting the fixes done as soon as possible. Don’t you think so? If you had a residential elevator, wouldn’t you get it fixed?

Every week, there are a plethora of stories about elevators and stairlifts to share with you in this blog. However, sometimes it gets hard to choose when the stories all pique my interest, so this week I’ve decided to write about a few different stories in news bite style. Hope you enjoy!

A Special Breakdown – When is it acceptable for an elevator to break down and make you walk almost 900 steps down? When it happens in the Washington Monument! According to the Salisbury Post, an elevator got stuck, causing visitors to the building to descend using a banned staircase. What’s so special about this unfortunate mechanical failure is the history that these visitors got to see:

“…the interior of the monument has some 200 carved commemorative blocks donated during its construction. They represent states. There is a Deseret block, Utah’s name before it became “Utah.” There are blocks from cities. One from New Bedford, Mass., has a carving of a whale. There are blocks from foreign countries, including one from the sultan of Turkey that has an inscription by the court poet. There are stones from fraternal and civic organizations; 22 from the Masons alone.”

Museum for Elevators? – Elevators have been around for many decades, but does that mean they need a whole museum dedicated to their history? Of course it does! Gothamist reports that one man has put together an impressive museum:

“Creator Patrick Carrajat has crammed some 4,000 elevator-centric items into the second floor of the Taxi Building at 21-03 44th Ave, including, but not limited to: antique meters and gauges, a collection of elevator postal history (including a complete set of first day of issue covers for the 5.3 cent elevator stamp), and a signed photo of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in an Titanic-era elevator.”

Hey, it’s free!