About the Elevator Calculator
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How to safely transport people in elevators is one of the challenges of opening up economies after the COVID19 pandemic. Enclosed spaces with limited air circulation make elevators coronavirus transmission hotspots. The US Center for Disease Control and Prevention recommends limiting the number of passengers in the elevators to maintaining 6 feet (2 meters) distances. That creates a logistical problem for employers who have thousand people to move within a single building.
COVID19 Elevator Calculator is designed to assess the times required to transport people from the ground floor to their workplaces in the morning and to bring them to the ground floor at the end of the workday. The simulation results provided by the Calculator should not be interpreted as precise, but rather as qualitative estimates to guide further investigation.
If simulation times produced by Calculator indicate that the existing elevator capacity creates a bottleneck in the safe operation of the building, the building management or the employer(s) might decide to reduce the time building residents spend on waiting and riding the elevators by applying:
- a staging approach, asking employees to come to work at different times,
- ask people working on particular floors to come to work at a predetermined time,
- extend workweek to weekends to reduce the number of people in the building at any given time,
- utilize stairs
The Elevator Calculator simulation model is based on Elevator Traffic Handbook: Theory and Practice by G. Barney and L. Al-Sharif.