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Elevator Occupancy Sensor | |||||||||||||||||
How many times have you been in a packed elevator trying to reach an upper floor only to get stopped at every floor where there are passengers waiting to get in? This is a common occurrence in airports, hotels, and large office buildings where heavy usage patterns tend to exist. In addition to the frustration for people on the elevator, the current system also extends the wait time for people outside since the elevator will take longer to empty. Furthermore, there is the added frustration for these people because they have to press the call button a second or even third time always resulting in a lower place in the queue. The Elevator Occupancy Sensor would use floor and ceiling mounted infra-red emitters and reflectors to determine the amount of available space within an elevator. When 95% of the infra-red beams are broken, the elevator would disregard all outside requests for the elevator to stop. When this 95% threshold is no longer being met, the elevator would begin stopping again for outside requests.
Leslee Parker, Jan 25 2008
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Mean people could hold out their arms, bags, etc, and block the sensors, so they would reach their own floors more quickly.
Better to hire a midget or a poor immigrant to run the elevator, in exchange for tips.
Ever see the little sign in the elevator that posts the weight limit? Aside from the question of who gets fined for exceeding the weight limit the solution for this is to have the elevator not stop for additional people until the weight of the current load is under some arbitrary amount.
I think that smart electronics could defeat attempts to fool the system with arm-waving. Also, this would be socially discouraged by co-riders looking down their noses at the offender. And the rare cases of successful system-fooling would be less costly than the current inefficiency of having full elevators make excessive stops.
What makes me a bit leery of this idea is that elevator manufacturers must have thought along these lines. What's stopped them from trying to implement this?
Most elevator systems have a weight sensor in the floor of each elevator car. The last time you pushed the call button and the elevator went right past your floor, it was probably close to its weight capacity and did not want to pick up any new passengers until it could unload some of the ones already on it.
Based on the estimation of the weight of the 'average' person, the weight sensor can already refuse to move the elevator if too many people get in, so I think this idea is already partially solved.