C O N S T R U C T I O N S T R AT E G I E S
change the face of London’s transport network, and reinforce the UK’s position at the head of global innovations. Yet it also offers a practical solution that could ease congestion in dozens of underground networks across the world too.” A waiting game While MULTI’s potential to transform the design of buildings and metro installations is apparent, there is also an important facilities management dimension to consider. Elevator downtime can have an enormous impact on the productivity 18
June 2018
of a building, a costly problem given that, worldwide, more than 12mn elevators make 7bn trips moving more than a billion people every day. “Downtime is a big issue,” Schierenbeck says. “If we look into the service part of the elevator business we predict that every elevator, on average, has a tendency to stop four to six times a year. This translates into overall downtime for the elevator industry at around 190mn hours annually.” A study by Columbia University sheds further light on the issue. It found that in 2010, office workers in