Neat idea, complicated device. This video was some 8 years old at the time and it has never become a commercial thing. But the idea of an elevator that can move in 4 directions is neat at least in concept
So, a turbolift then? I guess some people either don't like walking or travelators aren't expensive enough.
Turbolifts I believe are suspended in their tubes by mag-lev, which is also how they move.
i would add driverless people-movers like the kind at Morgantown, WV or the Atlanta Plane Train to be a kind of horizontal elevator. They're one of my favorite kinds of mass transportation. But sadly they also tend to be the wrong answer for something that can be done better or even cheaper with trams or busses so they don't get much implementation.
It's pretty cool, even as a technological dead end. Disney hoped to sell their own People Mover (the DisneyWorld model, not the earlier one) to locations as an actual suplemental mass transportation system, but apart from one airport in Texas and maybe a secret one in DC, it never really took off.
The one on the video seems such a neat system even though it's mostly self contained on a kind fixed loop. It's the kind of thing I always imagined in big cities winding around everywhere without the need for fuel guzzling buses and taxis everywhere. I remember as a kid in the 80s seeing sketches of such systems with rails on the side of buildings and pods moving that way too.
The company behind the Multi elevator was looking into a potential IPO as of about a year ago:
www.globalbankingandfinance.com
Edit:
It's apparently still being explored:
According to wikipedia, there are no installations of the Multi system beyond the testing sites as of 2024.
en.wikipedia.org
The company makes a lot of regular elevators, so an IPO wouldn't necessarily mean more Multi elevators.
TK Elevator IPO Plans: Multi-Billion Euro Valuation Insights | Global Banking & Finance Review
By Emma-Victoria Farr and Christoph Steitz FRANKFURT (Reuters) - TK Elevator's owners are weighing the United States as a location for a potential...
Edit:
It's apparently still being explored:
According to wikipedia, there are no installations of the Multi system beyond the testing sites as of 2024.
TK Elevator MULTI - Wikipedia
The company makes a lot of regular elevators, so an IPO wouldn't necessarily mean more Multi elevators.
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