Monday, April 24, 2006

Stuffed Elevators

The acceptable level of crowding for a given volume is very differently viewed here in Beijing.

For example, on most buses in the States, once all the seats are full, people will stand in the aisles. Then once the aisles are full, people don't get on the bus. Here, once the seats and aisles are full, people just push in harder so that eventually the inside of the bus is one solid mass of people from just inside the back door, up past the driver, and into the the steps at the front of the bus. I'm hoping to take a really good picture of this someday, but for now you can see a shot here.

This mentality also applies to the subway cars and to elevators. Here is a special little story from Cara:

While going to my language class in the nearby office building, I had a chance to read a sign I had never seen before inside any elevator. I was probably around the 8th person in the elevator and more were coming in as the doors were repeatedly pushed back open. I had plenty of time to look around as I took deep breaths (or at least as deep as possible in the amount of space afforded a single individual) and reminded myself how nice it is to be tall in such an environment. (Yup - 5'4" lets me look over many a crowd if I just lift my chin a little.) I pondered the number of people attempting to enter the elevator and read the stamped sign over the buttons for the various floors:

"10 person, 1000 kg maximum load".

As the doors were finally allowed to close, just below the stamped plate a tansluscent panel I had never noticed before started to causally blink red. The red sign was blinking this message:

"Car overload"

Eventually, after confirming that the elevator car would indeed not move until the load was changed, about 2 or 3 people got off. The doors closed again and with only 14 or so people squashed inside off we went.

Its conforting to know that the elevator designers do not rely on individuals to actually read their signs.

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