Lift / Elevator planning tools, anyone?

Station Designer has some sophisticated tools for pedflow... but this is overkill for most building types.

OTOH, most buildings will have a lift / elevator for ADA/DDA compliance.... which will need to be sized and selected. The interesting thing is that there is a dynamic relationship between the size of the floorplates/building and their disposition vertically. This would drive the size and number of lifts and their enclosing shafts.

The sizing / planning calcs are becoming more available and would benefit from better links with design apps like OBD. For example, the area and storey info could be extracted automatically quite easily from OBD or OBSD, and used to feed the planning app which could then generate the shaft / car / lift front and machine room elements using OBD's parametric modeling tools.

The calculation process these days is largely automated using apps which seem to be coming down in cost and getting easier to use... but are still problematic as most designers have to go through a third party to access them. This results in a lot of guess work in the early stages of the design that will need to be reworked later. Anyone who has worked on building cores know how disruptive any kind of change will be and the size of the core will always under pressure to maximise net areas.

Most of this book will only be interesting to the lift math guys, but Part A does hammer home the importance of understanding and planning for circulation flows, even when there are no lifts involved. Something that most building designers only have a very sketchy idea about (myself included). Next time you visit a completely undersized entrance lobby or a crowded lift landing, you'll know what happened ;-)