It's clearly time to make construction hoists permanent!
That's my new thing. Gonna be a running joke/not joke. People are gonna be sick of it.
I think that of the major livability issues with new buildings that we see pop up in our Forum pages, the one that I believe have the best chance of making some headway on is adequate elevator service. (Poor layouts is the other obvious one, but the causes of that are more complex, the definitions more subjective, and I feel like that issue is likely more than we have the ability to bite off. I'd love to be proven wrong though.)
More study needs to be done on the elevator issue to come up with more refined recommendations, but yup, 1 elevator for every 100 units is an easily understood metric that is not an unreasonable target pending a magic, better informed algorithm that we could apply with more vigor.
The City does deduct elevator shafts (and stairs and garbage chutes) from the 750 square metre floor-plate calculations, so developers do not have that excuse for not adding another elevator shaft, and besides, the Tall Buildings Guidelines does have a vague reference to allowing larger floor-plates for taller buildings (without creating tables to set out expectations exactly), but all of that is about the elegance of the proportions that would be plunked onto the City's skyline, and has nothing to do with incrementally providing more elevators for buildings with incrementally more suites.
Anyway, here's what we could do: get more graphic about this by providing a visual reference of how many more elevators a proposal would need to make the 1 elevator per 100 suite threshold, and the best graphic I can think of is ugly construction hoists suggested as permanent eyesores on the exterior of buildings that don't meet acceptable vertical transportation service levels.
So, if anyone with Photoshop™ skills would like to volunteer to overlay images of construction hoists over a generic point tower rendering, I'd love to be able to use a graphic in our front page stories that would show how many construction hoists would need to be made permanent on the exterior whichever proposal for it to hit the target. This one, for example, would need a matched pair of construction hoists on the outside to do it.
Volunteers?!
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