Terrific story on the ups and downs of elevators:

The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war.

I’ve always thought the maths of elevator service must be intriguing - at my work, the 14 story building serviced by 4 fast lifts is the cause of endless frustration, while the 7 story serviced by 6 slow carts is a relative pleasure:

The term “elevatoring” refers to the discipline of designing a building’s elevator system: how many, how big, how fast, and so on. You need to predict how many people will be using the elevators, and how they’ll go about their business. It isn’t rocket science, but it has its nuances and complications. The elevator consultant George Strakosch, in the preface to “The Vertical Transportation Handbook,” the industry bible, refers to it as the “obscure mystery.” To take elevatoring lightly is to risk dooming a building to dysfunction and its inhabitants to a kind of incremental purgatory.