99% the "close door" button works immediately. Vs say USA where 80% are not even connected and where some are connected but the door doesn't respond for 1-2 seconds?
95% there are no light sensors, only pressure sensors. I'm guessing in the USA those are mandatory that there is a light sensor that if interrupted, causes the doors to open. In Japan those mostly don't exist, there is only a pressure sensor
In Japan it's not uncommon to have someone exit the elevator and just as they exit, press the close button so the door will close immediately behind them. This is a "sorry I interrupted your time by having to stop the elevator" gesture. This wouldn't work in the USA because the light sensors would trigger the doors reopening.
Once that time has passed, the door close. So there is no window in which the button would be useful.
What's the logic behind requiring this to happen every time? Why not just have a handicap button like doors do, and letting the elevator stay efficient the rest of the time?
And that's exactly the reason, i.e., to shoo away those with a good pair of legs, because otherwise people who do need elevators might end up waiting forever.
It is possible that there will be a default dwell time that is larger than the minimum, in which case the pressing the door close button would shorten the window to the minimum, but most elevators won't do that as the minimum is long enough already.
Similarly the door close button may have effect when the door open period was extended, such as by the door sensors, or pushing the door open button to prevent door closing, but the exact details will vary.
In other operating modes, especially firefighter mode, but also some maintenance modes, and some modes that expect a dedicated elevator operator (who can ensure the door remains open long enough for disabled people if present), the door close buttons do absolutely do have an impact, and can violate the normal dwell time rules.
Once it’s moving with several floors selected, the open and close buttons don’t seem to do anything.
Sounds annoying. If I see an elevator stop at a floor then I'd like a chance to actually get on it, instead of having my time wasted by a futile gesture that might save someone a second or two.
Simple example: the single elevator in a building is empty and heading up to the 10th floor to pick up people heading down. If there’s a button press “I want to go up” on floor 3 while the elevator passes floor 2, should the elevator stop at floor 3 to pick up passengers? Probably not, as the passengers might want to go to the 20th floor, and it would be unfair to those on the 10th floor for the elevator to go up to the 20th floor before picking them up.
(corollary: if you see an elevator going in the direction you want to go pass the floor you’re waiting on, that’s not necessarily a bug in the scheduler)
If, on the other hand, there’s a button press “bring me to the 10th floor”, the elevator could stop at floor 3, pick up passengers, drop them off at the 10th floor, pick up those waiting there and go down. That means those waiting on floor 10 have to wait a bit longer for the extra stop on floor 3, but efficiency in #persons/hour or #person-floors/hour goes up.
1. it should always stop if it's going in the direction you want to go.
2. All people inside the elevator must be dropped off before changing direction
It's not that hard. One creates a cost function for each floor. The cost for a floor is the time spent since the button for that floor was pushed. The elevator goes for the floor with the highest cost.
It's the same idea with traffic lights. Have a cost function which is the wait time for each car. Minimize it. Of course, traffic lights never do this, resulting in grossly inefficient light changes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZUUr2nHpAE
There's also the "push to call, pull to cancel" mentioned in a sibling comment --- observe how the buttons are shaped such that they imply you can pull on them:
Many thanks for these videos, the shape of the buttons in the last video is exactly how I remember them (both the push/pull floor select buttons and the push-only door close/open buttons, and yes, I'm sure it was an Otis); the main difference is that there were many more floors.
Have a voice announce each floor. Much better than a stupid chime as each floor is passed, as then blind people have to count.
The voice is cheap as dirt, too. As the IBM PC showed, you can get perfectly intelligible voice from connecting a speaker to a 5V IO pin and turning it on and off rapidly, based on a recorded waveform. Wouldn't cost any more than a chime.
My furnace has a blinkenlight for its status. Slow blink, it's working ok. Fast blink, something wrong. I go have a look, it's blinking. Is that a fast or slow blink? I hate the people that design these things.
Voice-announced floors is pretty much universal in China. In Hong Kong, it’s also done in three languages. The current direction (up or down) of the elevator is also announced. There are exceptions, of course, like really old buildings that don’t have rich incorporated owners to retrofit the elevators.
There was even a "You are pressing too many floor buttons" message.
[1] https://www.soundboard.com/sb/OtisElevatorVoiceAnnouncements
Or a third option: it's just shoddy implementation that happens to have an annoying effect.
I've always wondered if elevators code detect when they were full and avoid stopping for outside requests. Some combination of total weight + weight change could likely be a heuristic that improves performance overall.
* Double press the button (like double-click)
* Long press the button
* Press the button 5 times really fast.
The article says this is in Japan, but would these not work anywhere?
Also, the Honda CR-V ad on this page (on mobile at least) is a new kind of annoying that I hope doesn't catch on, where it "frames" the web page, occluding the text you're trying to read. It sort of reminds me of dot-com era ad tactics, where no amount of annoying your customers is off-limits.
You aren't the customer. :) Their customers only care about ROI on their ad spend. This tactic is designed to benefit them, not you. Whether it does benefit them is debatable.
I guess they are trying hard to keep it that way.
I do buy vehicles from time-to-time though, so I think I am a potential customer.
If I had to guess I'd say in the US it's nearly always Otis or Schindler elevators that I'm riding. Do the Otis elevators installed in Japan have this feature but the Otis ones in the US lack the feature? I've never tried double-clicking to undo.
It did also work on a cruise ship, which was good because kids had hit all the floor buttons and run.
There are other button codes. Once, when I was in Japan and we waited at 8am for a lot of full elevators going past opening up the person I got in with (to another nearly full elevator) held down the G button for several seconds, all of the floors flashed and we went straight down without stopping. I asked as we got off, and apparently on other elevators this floor bypass can be done by holding down the close door button the entire trip.
FWIW, I didn't recognize the manufacturer, and it's been too long for me to recall it offhand, but I thought it was a really neat feature. Very useful if you accidentally hit the wrong button or if some five-year-old wanted to see all the lights.
People also tend to push the button here without looking whether it's already lit so this would probably backfire.
For example, I suspect all of these cheat codes can be enabled or disabled based on wishes by the building owner, and aside from parameters like how long the door stays open, the dispatching strategies can be configured too. Seeing the options and the thoughts that go into choosing a configuration would be super interesting.
https://elevation.fandom.com/wiki/Elevator_car_call_cancella...
I entered an elevator with 2 friends, we were talking, and by accident I came in contact with the buttons. These were all sensor buttons, so without any pressure I had just triggered (almost) all floors, much to the delight of my friends (and even some of the other people in the elevator). As we had to go to the 10th or 11th floor, needless to say that it was quite embarassing ;-)
Of course the other passengers may not feel that way.
Not super useful if there were other people in the car. But useful if you were by yourself.
I tried some basic DTMF but couldn't figure it out, sadly..
But it can also be used for evil: cancel a valid stop that someone commanded and hope they don't notice.