Elevator lines at conventions

[sparr]

I'm tired of waiting 10, 20, even 40 minutes for an elevator at Dragon*Con, Frolicon, etc. I've seen convention ops or security try to deal with this problem on many occasions, but often the steps taken are not enough, or come too late. That is not to say that I'm not appreciative of their efforts, but I'd like to help. I'm going to lay out a few ideas here for mitigating this problem, some of which might not have been considered before. The ease of implementation, manpower requirements, and effectiveness of these vary, but I think they are all good ideas.

1) Empty the elevators at the top and bottom floors. No going up to go down or vice versa. The process of emptying them won't directly speed things up, but as people figure out what's going on and stop misbehaving then the decrease in elevator misappropriation will improve efficiency. This idea requires 2 staff per bank of elevators.

1a) Put an attendant in each elevator to stop people from riding the wrong direction in the first place. This requires one staff per elevator.

2) Sort the waiting line/crowd by destination floor. You can't control which floors an elevator gets called to from outside, but if you only put even numbered floor people on elevator A and odd numbered floor people on elevator B then you will decrease the number of stops of each elevator by about 25%. This idea requires 1 staff per primary elevator boarding floor (such as the three bottom floors in the Dragon*Con Hyatt).

3) Designate one elevator for special circumstances. Wheelchairs, large carts, etc. Put an attendant in that elevator, and give them a fire key. This way they can decide exactly which floors to stop at, without the elevator stopping for calls along the way.

4) Ask the hotel to disable elevator calls and destinations for floors that are served by escalators. Put an attendant on those floors with a radio, so that the special circumstances elevator can come down to pick up people with carts or wheelchairs on those floors. This will reduce the number of stops of each elevator by 5-10%, weighted towards "sorry, elevator is full" sorts of stops. This idea requires 1 staff per disabled floor, and either an implementation of idea #3 or some other override.

5) Incentivize use of the stairs where possible. Something as simple as a raffle ticket for each walk up the stairs, even with an expected value of a few cents per ticket (that is, $100 worth of prizes after giving out 2000+ tickets), would have a significant impact. This requires 1 staff per stairwell.

I'll edit this post as people make further suggestions, and hope to send it to various convention staff members when it is "finished".

Comments

Re: Um a word

[jolefay.livejournal.com]

We did exactly #2---why are you so annoyed that it did not work? Seriously, volunteer-maker the suggestion and watch everyone freak and yell WE TRIED THAT.

Re: Um a word

[sparr0.livejournal.com]

I'm dense. I need you to explain to me what happened when you did #2 and it didn't work. My suggestion wasn't very specific on implementation, so I don't know what, precisely, you did. Did you have pre-sorted lines, or were you sorting people out of the crowd as the elevators were waiting to be filled? How many and what sort of groups did you split into (even/odd, top/bottom floors, etc)? Were you doing the splitting just on the Lobby floor or also on the floors below? Was the splitting handled by people on the floor or in the elevators or both? Where did the congestion form (if you had lines, did they run toward the registration desk or toward the escalators)?