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Really simple topic, I'm doing my final essay of my university degree on Escalators. I get the monumental importance of this: how the study of the importance of escalators anthropologically and sociologically could mean thousands of people can understand why I am dwelling on this today but...
I am stumped. I guess in essence this is a homework topic that everyone will frown upon and probably get closed, but as trivial as this is, why do we have the escalator when we have the elevator?
While yes: I want to answer this question to get past this paper, I was also personally curious about this. The elevator was once an amusement ride and despite being built over 80 years after the first modern elevator was built in Russia (I believe), I cannot see any real importance on the escalator when we have the elevator.
Personally speaking, the escalator is just more efficient when climbing small quantities of floors (up or down), plus the choice of how fast or slow you want to travel up/down these floors. The elevators always take so long and require patience. I've written all of this down already.
But why is it important? If we remove all personal factors, the escalator can achieve what the elevator does for more people (the handicapped, construction workers & materials) and it is just simply better. So why do we have the escalator and why was it needed despite the elevator having practical use for so long?
My only stretch of logic here is that it is like the iPad, we had palm pilots, touch-screen phones, notebooks, laptops and even computers and yet making a convenience of an already convenient world is somehow marketably good (I mean shit, they're making a mini iPad, how stupid is that shit?).
So yeah, I guess you're helping my homework, but has anyone else wondered this yet? I suppose the symbolism of escalators is the luxury of moving stairs (and the avoidance of being too fucking close to people you don't know).
Anyways, funny thought. The other funny thought was that I spent over 20 years of my life in school to write a final sociological paper on the escalator (this is a 400-level sociology course). It's funny and yet, so sad.
  
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I think the real benefit in using an escalator comes from being able to move large quantities of people continuously whereas this same outcome could not be achieved with an elevator unless it was very large or operated at an extreme speed. Of course, escalator utility value is negatively correlated to the number of floors, if I'm using my statistic mind correctly.
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consider us claustrophobic people? elevators are metal boxes closed to the world, it's not particularly relaxing, and i'm fairly certain claustrophobia is common enough to compete with the disabled, as well as those who just want to move materials. the aesthetic differences really are notable as well.
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elevators are more a form of transportation up and down where as escalators are used as means of "herding" people to where they should go. Just think of spaces with allot of people, like airports, subways, rail stations, or other buildings that need to engineer the space so that people flow in particular directions. It would be utter chaos otherwise.
Also sometimes it's the sheer distance that makes escalators good, just imagine if you would walk a distance of 500 meters or more, in this case a escalators is preferred since the walkers otherwise might get tired and slow down thus blocking everyone else from getting to the destination. Escalators are (believe it or not) incredible useful and really helps people to know where they are suppose to go and their purposes are vastly different compared to elevators.
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The benefits of escalators is that they waste very little space, allow a natural flow of traffic, are open air, and are perfectly usable even if they break. And they can transfer people many times more efficiently than elevators.
i think the fact that elevators are wait-stop-go and escalators are just -go- has something to do with it. Escalators are just much more pleasing to use, for some reason.
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Continuous flow of masses of people
Compare 100 people going up a floor on a single elevator to 100 on an escalator
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Yeah, I figured that'd be a good idea to study where the escalator can carry about 10,000 people an hour.
Can an elevator do that? Depends on the elevator I suppose.
Anyone else find how trivial and funny this whole discussion is on the escalator? We're basically discussing the pros and cons of an escalator, an everyday object of technology that represents nothing more than the ordered direction of transportation that has a set pace you can either choose to follow or go faster in exchange for physical exertion.
In any case, you guys are laying out some ideas I didn't consider. I still find it hard to make sense of sociologically examining an escalator. Everyone else chose easy subjects such as the Wii-Mote, touchpads and things we associate with new-age technology [more or less].
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As others have mentioned here already: the primary benefit of escalators are the potential volume they can move. That is to say, the primarially benefit large quantites that need to be moved automatically. Often it is goods that benefit from this more than people (we more commonly call those conveyor belts), but can be very useful in specific high-density areas that do not require high buildings, but support extreme amounts of human traffic. Good examples are sports stadiums, airports, and metro/subway stations.
Also, escalators that don't actually change your elevation (like the ones you sometimes see at airports) are very useful for keeping lots of traffic moving on in an orderly fashion.
Edit: Elevators are much better for moving extreme vertical distances, but come at the cost of not being able to really move all that much per unit space taken up and having higher transaction costs (that is higher costs in loading and unloading). They're meant to move significantly fewer people, but can move those fewer people faster once on the device itself. (if this is a net benefit depends on how far if you take loading/unloading costs into account).
Both clearly have areas where each is better applied.
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People have legitimate aversions to elevators, if nothing else.
However, my idea lies in "threshold of utility". (Like the term? I just made it up).
Essentially, if I want to go up 1 floor, I prefer stairs to an elevator. And I always prefer an escalator to stairs. So the threshold of utility for an escalator is very low.
However, If I want to go up 5 floors, obviously I'd prefer an elevator to stairs, and in my case I'd prefer an elevator to an escalator too. So where is the threshold where I don't care if its an elevator or escalator? Probably at 2 or 3 floors. More, and I prefer elevator. Less, and I prefer escalator. The concept is similar to two different phone contracts. One costs only $10/mo but also costs 50cents a minute. The other costs $50/mo but only 1cent a minute. The preference then depends on your usage scenario.
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I wish we could write an essay on something a toddler could analyze in 400 level physics courses...
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Why do we have those moving airport walk ways (seen some in Vegas too) when people can also ride around on the airport carts?
Elevators will give you a specific destination faster but will often require a period of wait. An escalator's function is actually exactly like a staircase (or a freeway on-ramp). Also, escalators give more of a "standing in line" (going somewhere) feeling vs possibly having to face each other or simply share the same space with other people.
I'd be curious about power consumption and building space needed for each (but that's less a sociological issue).
An interesting note about escalators in Finland: you always stand on the right and let people walk past on the left.
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Torte, have you ever been in a big skyscraper in a big city? Like New York for example, in the Empire State Building there are like 20 express elevators. They all hold maybe 20 people each and they go zoom zoom zoom and your ears pop when you ride them. You can go from the bottom to the top in a few seconds!
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Also, when an elevator breaks its fairly useless. When an escalator breaks, they're just stairs.
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On February 12 2013 07:23 ZeaL. wrote:
Also, when an elevator breaks its fairly useless. When an escalator breaks, they're just stairs.
hah! great point.
and anybody who thinks that thinking very hard about ordinary things is useless and trivial does not have the properly philosophical mindset 
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Batch process vs Continuous process. Continuous processes usually have much higher throughput. When not constrained by the need to traverse many levels, escalators are usually more efficient.
I guess you've never been in a lineup to get into an elevator?
(shit sucks, cause you're sitting there waiting on doors to open and you're not making any progress to take your mind off the boredom)
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On February 12 2013 07:28 sam!zdat wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2013 07:23 ZeaL. wrote:
Also, when an elevator breaks its fairly useless. When an escalator breaks, they're just stairs. hah! great point. and anybody who thinks that thinking very hard about ordinary things is useless and trivial does not have the properly philosophical mindset
I don't think it's trivial or useless, but it's definitely different than what we typically focus on everyday, eh?
Finding articles about the sociological context of escalators (that are peer-reviewed) is pretty tough though haha
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here's something
Now consider the escalators and elevators. Given their very real pleasures in Portman, particularly the latter, which the artist has termed ‘gigantic kinetic sculptures’ and which certainly account for much of the spectacle and excitement of the hotel interior— particularly in the Hyatts, where like great Japanese lanterns or gondolas they ceaselessly rise and fall—given such a deliberate marking and foregrounding in their own right, I believe one has to see such ‘people movers’ (Portman’s own term, adapted from Disney) as somewhat more significant than mere functions and engineering components. We know in any case that recent architectural theory has begun to borrow from narrative analysis in other fields and to attempt to see our physical trajectories through such buildings as virtual narratives or stories, as dynamic paths and narrative paradigms which we as visitors are asked to fulfil and to complete with our own bodies and movements. In the Bonaventure, however, we find a dialectical heightening of this process: it seems to me that the escalators and elevators here henceforth replace movement but also, and above all, designate themselves as new reflexive signs and emblems of movement proper (something which will become evident when we come to the question of what remains of older forms of movement in this building, most notably walking itself). Here the narrative stroll has been underscored, symbolized, reified and replaced by a transportation machine which becomes the allegorical signifier of that older promenade we are no longer allowed to conduct on our own: and this is a dialectical intensification of the autoreferentiality of all modern culture, which tends to turn upon itself and designate its own cultural production as its content.
I am more at a loss when it comes to conveying the thing itself, the experience of space you undergo when you step off such allegorical devices into the lobby or atrium, with its great central column surrounded by a miniature lake, the whole positioned between the four symmetrical residential towers with their elevators, and surrounded by rising balconies capped by a kind of greenhouse roof at the sixth level. I am tempted to say that such space makes it impossible for us to use the language of volume or volumes any longer, since these are impossible to seize. Hanging streamers indeed suffuse this empty space in such a way as to distract systematically and deliberately from whatever form it might be supposed to have, while a constant busyness gives the feeling that emptiness is here absolutely packed, that it is an element within which you yourself are immersed, without any of that distance that formerly enabled the perception of perspective or volume. You are in this hyperspace up to your eyes and your body: and if it seemed before that that suppression of depth I spoke of in postmodern painting or literature would necessarily be difficult to achieve in architecture itself, perhaps this bewildering immersion may now serve as the formal equivalent in the new medium.
Yet escalator and elevator are also in this context dialectical opposites: and we may suggest that the glorious movement of the elevator gondola is also a dialectical compensation for this filled space of the atrium—it gives us the chance at a radically different, but complementary, spatial experience: that of rapidly shooting up through the ceiling and outside, along one of the four symmetrical towers, with the referent, Los Angeles itself, spread out breath-takingly and even alarmingly before us. But even this vertical movement is contained: the elevator lifts you to one of those revolving cocktail lounges, in which, seated, you are again passively rotated about and offered a contemplative spectacle of the city itself, now transformed into its own images by the glass windows through which you view it.
fredric jameson
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Don't use escalators
Use the stairs.
It's almost funny sad when I'm the only one on the stairs and there is a line in front of the escalator.
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Hmm. Lots of good points brought up here, and while I agree with most, I think another factor to look at is the psychological framework between the two devices. Regardless of any pathological issues (claustrophobia vs agoraphobia) that might be present, at a subconscious level there are two different mechanisms that may be at play. An elevator, no matter how poshly appointed or quick to its task, is essentially a large cage in which a person enters and is then held at the mercy of mechanical or computerized controls. Once the door closes, the amount of control you have over when those doors opens is debatable. You cannot control where you are going, you often cannot see where you are going, and your body receives conflicting information. (Your eyes tell you everything is stationary. Your ears tell you you are moving.)
With an escalator, you instead have visual and physical agreement between the senses, and a sense of control. You can, if you want, turn around, or move quicker towards the bottom. (Turning around, of course, is inefficient and annoying to the people behind you.) If you absolutely have to, you may be able to get off the escalator entirely. Once in an elevator, you are in it until it stops. An escalator more closely matches a common experience for humans, the one of climbing up a steep hil or set of stairs, which may give them an advantage at a subconscious level. An elevator, on the other hand, could be a dissonant experience, something that you would not often find a parallel to in a more natural world. (And the only one that comes to my mind is not a positive one - falling.)
There is also a common perception of an elevator being a box hung by wires - although most of the elevators I see in 2-4 floor range are hydraulic piston driven boxes. But if you get into a conventional elevator, it doesn't feel as solid. (The 7-story elevator in my dorm could, quite literally, bounce or down about half a floor. I think. I couldn't see to measure it, but the damn thing was not comforting.) So there is, in the spectres hanging out in the subconscious, the image from films, TV, and stories of a cable snapping, and suddenly plummiting to a very quick stop. (I don't have statistics, but I think elevators are probably actually safer than escalators.)
There are pros and cons between the two - for example, I'd rather take an elevator over three floors than an open air, steep escalator - but the above is just an off the cuff bit of thinking of how they may compare at a subconscious level.
Oh, and probably cost. Economic considerations are usually paramount. (AKA, when in doubt, it's probably because of money.)
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The only reason elevators were invented was soo that people (delinquient teenage boys like myself) can run down elevators that are going up or run up elevators that are going down. can you go down on an elevator that is going up. Nope...
Also are moving walkways considered escalators? You know the one you find at some airports to help people walk down the tremendously long hallways between terminals. If you consider moving walkways as elevators then it helps transport people straight instead of up and down.
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EPT
