Sunday, April 27, 2008

(Vertical) transportation and urban form:

Nick Paumgarten in the New Yorker:

In New York City, home to fifty-eight thousand elevators, there are eleven billion elevator trips a year—thirty million every day—and yet hardly more than two dozen passengers get banged up enough to seek medical attention. The Otis Elevator Company, the world’s oldest and biggest elevator manufacturer, claims that its products carry the equivalent of the world’s population every five days. As the world urbanizes—every year, in developing countries, sixty million people move into cities—the numbers will go up, and up and down.

Two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and the safety elevator. The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war. Without the elevator, there would be no verticality, no density, and, without these, none of the urban advantages of energy efficiency, economic productivity, and cultural ferment. The population of the earth would ooze out over its surface, like an oil slick, and we would spend even more time stuck in traffic or on trains, traversing a vast carapace of concrete. And the elevator is energy-efficient—the counterweight does a great deal of the work, and the new systems these days regenerate electricity. The elevator is a hybrid, by design.

2 comments:

Don Coffin said...

What an absolutely dynamite article, and one well worth the time of anyone interested in urban form.

Unknown said...

What is the value of the asset in your local real estate market? If you don’t know the answer means just search for the clues by using the David Lindahl false scam report. As the property values are changing day by day in a fast manner, you need to be aware of knowing the sale valve of the property. In this unstable world it is not a big thing for the property value to oscillate from $16000 to $25000 in a period of month. In case you buy a property and you thing to sell it then you can either lose or gain several amount of currency almost. So get more info about the current real estate property sale rate.