• Treehugger, Wednesday, October 28, 2015 10:05 AM

Everybody devotes a lot of ink and pixels to horizontal transportation, to planes, cars, transit and bikes, and surprisingly little to vertical. Yet the numbers of people moved that way is astonishing; There are 12 million semi- automated vertical transportation systems in the world carrying a billion passengers per day. These vertical pods don’t always work either; 190 million hours are lost every year to downtime for maintenance and repairs, and in New York City, a cumulative 16.6 million years is spent waiting for them. These are of course elevators, which have been carrying people with a surprising degree of safety since the 1870s.

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