This is an email I wrote on 2008-04-30 to the person who maintains our floor regarding the ridiculous wait for an elevator in our lobby every morning. This is not the building management, but I hope that he forwards it along.
I’m sure you’ve been victim of the 9am elevator rush in the lobby. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen an elevator come down to the 2nd floor, then go back up again, while there’s a huge backlog of people in the lobby.
Well, here are some simple numbers to get a perspective on the situation if you feel so obliged to complain to building management:
In other words, for every minute of waiting in the lobby of this building, we’re collectively losing out on about $20k of productivity per year. If the average wait time throughout the entire year is 2 minutes, that’s $40k, 3 minutes, that’s $60k.
For every second the clock ticks, that’s over $300 lost.
This is using a set of gross underestimates. The true numbers are probably at least twice that amount. I personally waited for 5 minutes this morning. That’s more than 10% of my door-to-door commute spent standing in the lobby. If my time is valued at $40/hour, then I’m losing about $150 per minute per year.
The problem, of course, is that building management is not directly bearing the brunt of the cost. If they were, I suspect we would have gotten smarter elevators by now.
A very easy thing to do without having to significantly modify the elevators is to have all elevators return to the first floor during rush hour. If the modification to do this would cost $40k, but it shaves off 1 minute of wait time, then that would only require 2 years of operation to pay off the expense using my underestimate numbers.
Wes