Elevators are a staple in modern urban life — without them, our system of city planning, not to mention our way of life, would be virtually impossible. But how much time do Americans spend waiting for, or standing in elevators? The answer is startlingly high.
In a study of building efficiency, the folks at IBM have compiled data based on a survey of 6,486 office workers in 16 U.S. cities. The questions dealt with issues including building security, office temperature, use of alternative energy sources, environmental and conservation issues, and, of course, elevator time. The company organized its elevator results into the graph shown above. It’s no surprise that New York is the heads-above winner here — but what’s shocking is the sheer amount of time in aggregate Americans are simply standing in or in front of elevators.
Among IBM’s other findings:
• Los Angeles has the highest percentage (40%) of office buildings that automatically sense when people are in a room and adjust lights and temperature accordingly – compared with the national average of 27 percent.
• Only 26% of Phoenix respondents – the lowest percentage of all the cities surveyed – say their office buildings are environmentally friendly. San Francisco is highest at 45%.
• Fourteen % of New York City office workers who work in elevator buildings say they’ve been stuck in an elevator in the last 12 months. Of those, 67% said they had been stuck longer than 5 minutes.
The company compiled the full survey results into a “Smarter Buildings Index” that ranks the cities on a scale from highest to lowest efficiency. Here’s how the cities stack up:[SButtonZ button="digg"]
High: Los Angeles
Trending High: San Francisco, Boston, Atlanta
Average: Seattle, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, Denver, New York City, Detroit
Low: Washington, DC, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Tampa, Phoenix
There was an experiment done once, where complaints about elevator wait time disappeared when mirrors were placed in the lobby, so wait time wasn’t completely unproductive. Now a lot of places also have TVs both in the lobby and inside the elevators themselves.
Did they normalized by the number of people in each city? Cause it looks like the relative populations of cities. Also, is it greater metropolitan areas or just the city itself?
Elevators also contribute to the American obesity epidemic.
The City of NY Department of Design and Construction http://www.nyc.gov/html/ddc/html/design/active_design.shtml and others are taking steps to encourage people to take the stairs rather than the elevator as an opportunity to incorporate exercise and fitness into the workday.
Through innovative architecture, structures such as the NYT Building are making stairwells inviting places for people to congregate and socialize. The Southern Medical Association released a study earlier this year about using art and music to create a more aesthetically enticing environment in stairwells to incent people to choose to climb stairs over taking the elevator. Not only is the elevator perhaps wasted time, but a lost fitness opportunity.
See my post yesterday about “smart elevators” – http://www.triplepundit.com/2010/04/smart-elevators-bring-you-there-faster-more-efficiently/
There are some interesting innovations going on to reduce the time spent as well as the energy used!
I dont understand the chart:
It says “measured in years” but then “during the past 12 months”?
Using NYC as an example, I don’t understand how it is possible to be stuck in an elevator for 22.5 years over the last 12 months? Am I missing something or are the units wrong? Also, Denver is missing a number.
Building design needs to change!
Way too many buildings have stairwells that are shoved out of the way at corners, are poorly lit and ugly, and often have self-locking doors.
I used to live in an apartment with incredibly slow elevators. The bonus? You couldn’t get into the stairwell from the ground floor!
If elevators were such a big contributor to obesity, you’d expect Manhattan to have one of the USA’s highest obesity rates instead of one of the lowest.
What the anti-elevator recommendations miss is that elevators are necessary for high density, which contributes to walkability and lowers obesity. This is not to say that there aren’t unwalkable dense areas (e.g. the South Bronx) or walkable low-density areas (e.g. Zurich), but walkability and density generally contribute to each other.
I agree with Scott. Too many buildings design stairwells ONLY for emergencies. Theyre ugly, hidden and not user friendly, while elevators are front and center.
And yes, taking an elevator for one floor sucks, but as you said, many buildings lock stairwells so that you can use them to get to the ground floor, but not go up or between floors.
I wonder if Boston is lower than the etxas cities because of the age of the buildings? Many 4 story brownstones lack elevators.
Apologies for the Denver error – the correct number for Denver is 3.3 years.
Here’s the original report: http://www.ibm.com/press/attachments/IBM_Smarter_Buildings_Survey_White_Paper.pdf
I tried normalizing the figures per elevator. Far as I can tell, the wait/stuck time per elevator is pretty consistent among different cities – around 5-6 minutes.
Los Angeles has a lot more 4/5 story office buildings and far less high rises than cities such as Chicago & New York City (per capita). The downside being Los Angeles has a terrible amount of urban sprawl with office parks gobbling up rural lands.