Discussion from 4 months ago (248 points) <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14935700" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14935700</a>
The structure on Google Maps: <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/place/48°10'44.8%22N+8°37'30.7%22E/@48.1788614,8.6257922,523m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x0!8m2!3d48.179119!4d8.62518?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/maps/place/48°10'44.8%22N+8°37'30.7%2...</a><p>Wikipedia-Article (German, has more info): <a href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aufzugstestturm_(Rottweil)" rel="nofollow">https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aufzugstestturm_(Rottweil)</a><p>You can also see it from the Autobahn A81, driving to / from Rottweil...
It'd be interesting to see a large/tall building with a back wall dedicated to an elevator grid. Each tennant, instead of a door to a hallway (or in addition to it) would have an elevator door. Press the button, the lift shows up, and it can take you to any other property on that building.<p>Eventually you could merge this kind of thing with other buildings, forming a kind of grid. Going out for dinner? Ask Alexa for a ride while you're talking in the foyer, 20 seconds later doors open and you're whisked away to a nearby restaurant where all you have to do is exit the lift and walk to your table.
I work in a building with two cores each with 5 elevator shafts, and two elevators per shaft. Sometimes the top elevator can't go down because the bottom elevator is just below it. Having an elevator able to overtake the other would be very nice.<p>Also, you could use one shaft for going up and another for going down. I definitely see the usefulness here.
This sounds like some awesome tech, though the paranoid in me fears that in the off chance power goes off, what would keep these mag-lev cabins in place?<p>Maybe someone can chime in on this thought experiment, but how would an architect design this into a new building to take advantage of its full potential? From what I can tell, it seems that the system would need multiple horizontal planes for the elevator to run through as well as 1+ vertical planes. And if this should be able to go horizontally across the floor, then you might still need multiple elevator wells on a floor. With this design, I fail to see how this would be more cost effective than the 40% use of a standard system (in the article, Ctrl-F "40 percent")
Video showing them in action: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTsbFS4xmI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTsbFS4xmI</a>.
This could be good for seniors or people with mobility issues, for the rest, this will lead to articles about how lazy people have become and how we must get outside and get fit or cave in under the unrelenting laziness afforded by modernity.
Can someone explain this whole magnet thing?<p>Electromagnetism falls off with the square of the distance and works on really short distances, no?<p>So how can it work to move an elevator all the way across a shaft? And what if it fails?