Pressure Project 1, Gabe Carpenter, 2022

• I sat on the bench in my dormitory lobby watching people using the elevators around lunchtime.
• There is a lot of congestion right in front of the elevators, as several groups of people like to travel together and clog the small hallway while waiting their turn
• The hallway is a bit narrow, and there are only three elevators running on either side of the building. 
• There are roughly 1400 students in the building, divided by two that is 3 elevators per 700 students. 
• The current elevators cause a lot of slowdowns due to their lack of speed and poor efficiency in deciding what floors to go to and in what order. 
• The ways in which people enter the elevators can also cause a lot of issues, bringing various packages and other items that take up space. 
• The elevators are controlled by a keypad on the outside that gives the user an option for up or down, and a numbered pad on the inside that includes a list of all of the floors that the user can be taken to.

The main problem with congestion in my dorm is the elevators and the lack of movement that appears when there are a lot of people. The elevators can only visit one floor at a time, thus visiting a maximum of 3 floors per group. This is only counting if all occupants of each elevator are going to the same floor. Any variation of destinations would require more stops and slow down the process further. There is also the issue of cramming 6 to 9 people inside of one elevator, especially in current times as the Covid-19 pandemic continues to be a problem. 

My proposal is a new system of elevators made for maxim speed and efficiency in moving people from one floor to the next. These elevators would mainly be single occupancy machines intended to take one person at a time. This may seem to be counterproductive at first, but the efficiency comes from the simplicity of the system. When one person enters and presses their floor, the elevator can instantly close and move at the maximum comfortable speed to the desired location and return. With less weight, the elevator can move faster, and the doors can automatically be closed once a single person is inside, instead of waiting for more potential riders. This also allows for less confusion about which floor to go to and will return elevators much quicker than waiting on a single machine to bounce between 3 to 5 floors. The system would have six single elevators on each side, with an additional cargo elevator at the end as well. The cargo elevator would be intended to move large packages or any other objects that could not fit on the personal elevators and would be able to accommodate one person along with the move-in cargo bins that most dorms have in them.