You can look at it from another point of view: elevators have so many safety mechanisms nowadays that they can fall 84 floors and still not cause any injuries to their passengers.
Per mile travelled, (modern) elevators are literally the safest form of transit ever developed by our species. They are rather impressive devices from a safety perspective, somebody else linked the video in the thread so I'll chime in and say I highly recommend the defcon video "From the Pit to the Penthouse".
> Per mile travelled, (modern) elevators are literally the safest form of transit ever developed by our species.
Aeroplanes are at 0.05 deaths per billion km. There are around 30 deaths due to elevators in the US each year. So for elevators to be safer people would need to be traveling 600 billion km in elevators each year. The population of the US is around 300 million, so each person would need to average 1000km a year, or around 3km a day.
Even people in tall skyscrapers probably don't hit that number on too many days.
Definitely, I don't think aircraft can be beat on a fatalities/distance basis given not just their sheer distance covered by their uniformity and professional standards of maintenance. There are still plenty of ancient elevators around, and plenty that don't receive the upkeep they should (granted that's always been an issue for a lot of general infrastructure). That said elevators are still pretty safe, and are you sure that "due to" part is appropriate to use in a passenger perspective thread?
>There are around 30 deaths due to* elevators in the US each year*
I last looked at it many years ago so I don't have current sources, but the numbers presented by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and Consumer Product Safety Commission indicated that around half the deaths (14/30 at that point) were those working near or with elevators, not the passengers. That is of course an important issue, but it's also a different one then in-use operational safety mechanisms, and I don't think airline rates cover on the ground maintenance deaths either. That stats I remember from around 5 years ago were that there were something like 900,000 elevators operating in the US and about 18 billion trips a year. So in terms of "get on the moving box, arrive safely" they still look pretty good.
All this is US centric granted, it wouldn't surprise me if there are countries where elevator deaths are much lower, though then again I'm sure there are places where maintenance is worse too. Aircraft are somewhat unique from a safety perspective in terms of not just themselves but the entire system built up around them worldwide.
> I last looked at it many years ago so I don't have current sources, but the numbers presented by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and Consumer Product Safety Commission indicated that around half the deaths (14/30 at that point) were those working near or with elevators, not the passengers. That is of course an important issue, but it's also a different one then in-use operational safety mechanisms, and I don't think airline rates cover on the ground maintenance deaths either.
Sure, but I decided it didn't really matter since I don't think that people in the US even average 100m in an elevator every day, so even if only one person died every year aeroplanes would still be safer.
The other option for "safest vehicle" I considered was spacecraft. Even though they have a high mortality-per-journey I thought that maybe they travelled so far that they would come out looking pretty good per-mile. But, as it turns out, the moon isn't far enough away.
Looking at wikipedia [0] they also list deaths per billion journeys and per billion hours. Following on from your assumptions, these give the following:
At 117 deaths per billion journeys, only 256 million would be required, which would be fewer than one journey per person per annum. So lifts are much safer per journey.
For 30.8 deaths per billion hours it would be just under a billion hours needed (or 3.25 hours per person per year, ~0.5 minutes a day). I would imagine per minute this would put lifts and air travel at a similar risk per minute.
Wikipedia doesn't state if these are for general aviation or just commercial operations, which would skew the numbers considerably.
It's funny that many workplaces encourage using the stairs for health and fitness reasons, when you're much more likely to suffer serious injury or death in a slip and fall on the stairs than getting hurt in an elevator.
Yeah, I'd be way more interested in the safety mechanism behind how these people got out unscathed vs the rescue effort. This is really impressive engineering.
I was browsing through a list of elevator accidents a while back and noticed that the two main causes of death seemed to be people stepping blindly into empty elevator shafts and people who tried to get out of the elevator when stuck.
So, my recommendations for elevator safety are: watch where you're going, and wait for help to arrive if there's an elevator malfunction.
I never understood the stepping into an empty shaft, because AFAIK the outer doors are opened by the inside doors on the car. So they can't open on their own if the car isn't there. Might be possible on older elevators with manual doors?
There can be an open door to an empty shaft when the elevator is undergoing maintenance. This happens sometimes in the high-rise building where I work. Normally the area around the open shaft is blocked off with some kind of barrier during maintenance, but I suppose that the mechanics could forget to put up the barrier out of negligence or someone could disregard the barrier and walk past it. It's also possible that the people who fall into the shaft are the elevator mechanics themselves rather than passengers.
It's been a while and I'm not sure which list I had read. It may have actually just been a few incidents that struck me as easily preventable. I think they were mostly due to maintenance in progress or pushing against the doors.
Looking over this list[1], it's interesting how almost nobody in an elevator ever dies. The worst incidents tend to involve people or objects that are halfway into the elevator.
Otis said in a PBS special that the only people that die in elevators in the US anymore are people that work on them, unfortunately, but even that is only a few each year. I do remember an accident several years ago at Ohio State where some students were crushed at a dorm by trying to stuff it full. Anyway, like others have said, they're statistically safer than many other things.
Cable elevators are one of the safest vehicles you can be in. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they were safer than taking the stairs. There are so many redundant safety mechanisms in there you should feel extremely safe.
As long as you don't step into an empty shaft or fuck around with the doors if the elevator is stuck between floors your risk of injury is just about 0. The lift in the article didn't fall 84 floors, that'd have kicked in the governor. A lift is still perfectly safe if a single cable snaps.
