It also gives a lot of fascinating information about elevators in general and specific operation modes.
e.g. there is a "riot mode" where the elevator goes to every floor except the first (or ground in EU) floor aka to the lobby. The idea was that, during a riot, a luxury building in NYC would lock the stairwell access from the lobby but people could still take the elevator to the other floors to visit their neighbors etc
Sort of similar: elevators in Israel may be programmed to stop at every floor during the Sabbath, as riding the elevator is permitted according to the talmudic definition of "work", but summoning the elevator is not.
I've always found it fascinating and delightful how Jewish people in particular seem to treat loopholes like that in their religion as features rather than bugs. Christians (the only other religion I've got much exposure to) seem to either ignore their rules entirely, or interpret them more according to a vague vibe of intent.
Maybe God gave Moses specific guidance on elevator use on sabbaths, it just got lost in translation because Moses had no clue what God was talking about
That's a weird take. For the little I know about most religions, intent and the spirit of the law is what's important. God doesn't need evidence or justification, it just knows. Allowing workarounds is encouraging trickery, which seems at odds with the function of religion as moral guidance and social cohesion.
I personally don't have any problem with the idea of exploiting loopholes, I mean, it is Hacker News, and cleverness and exploiting loopholes is pretty much the definition of being a hacker. But from a religion perspective, it looks more like an atheist, or even satanist value.
While the Judaic God definitely seems more good-natured than the Catholic one (at least in this one regard), as an Atheist, to be so close to the point and still miss it is some /r/selfawarewolves level rage.
I used to write software that used the third-party interface into elevator controllers. I am still unclear what “Korean lunch mode 1” and “Korean lunch mode 2” in Otis controllers do.
>The basic idea is that the switch activates only sometimes, and only after a delay, making the action indirect and uncertain. Several Orthodox poskim have ruled as thus makes the device permissible for general consumer use.[5][6] Others, however, have reached the opposite conclusion.[2]
Similarly, Shabbat mode on kitchen appliances (1).
I do wonder, however, whether there are dedicated individuals within religious organizations that assess a given spiritual framework and consider workarounds for things that might be dangerous to the health of their religious community.
It strikes me that if you're deriving whether an action is safe for your religion based on a technicality like "a signal light turns on", then either:
1. Your religion needs to lighten up a bit. I doubt any deity cares about small technical details like that.
or
2. You're in violation of rules anyway. The intent is still there, so even if you're using a loophole, there's no practical difference between those two actions. Both you and whatever deity know you're committing an offense.
The Jewish belief is explicitly contrary to that: whether you obey the letter of the rule is what matters, not the intention of it, and this is as God wills it.
There are religious scholars in Judaism who deal with these issues -- you aren't the first to question it and your concerns are enumerated and addressed thoroughly.
I don’t think there are many Orthodox Jews out there who haven’t heard some variation of those two points countless times in their lives. I think your apparent belief that there’s any amount of novelty in what you wrote is actually a lot more telling here.
In buildings with many floors, it's actually usually more clever. E.g. the elevator might stop at every second floor on the way up, assuming that you can always go one floor extra and go down the stairs or something. And it might not stop at all floors on the way down in apartments buildings, since you're usually going out of the building and rarely just changing floors.
I've seen that in New York City too. Probably common in other cities, or at least parts of cities with large Jewish populations. A condo I lived in had a malfunction that put it into a similar mode, and it was over a long holiday weekend so he had to suffer with it until the next business day when elevator repair could come out. Even in a ten-story building, it really adds a lot of extra time to your ride when it has to stop at every floor.
If you’re in reasonably good shape, stairs are a deceptively fast mode of transport. Easy to win a race against slower elevators over smallish distances.
Also exercise benefits, but I make myself take the stairs under the guise of saving time.
In Madrid the subway is deep, I had to climb 180 steps to home. I did it running, it’s actually much easier than walking. Best shape I ever was in my life…
You may want to avoid that if you go to St Petersburg. Deepest station is 80m down. I’m not sure all the stations even have stairs, all I remember are endless escalators (though it dates back 25 years now so…)
Meanwhile, on the London Underground, the lengths of all sets of stairs down to platform level are described as "equivalent to 15 floors" irrespective of how high they actually are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBTvmrRGlbE&t=41s
There is another reason for the close door button: so that the manufacturer or service mechanic have something to blame.
In my building the elevators were brand new (less than a few months old) and were constantly out of order. The service mechanic was called in time after time, he would arrive, run diagnostics, find that nothing was wrong, then reset the control system and leave.
After the 10th time or so, the building manager demanded to have the entire system replaced under warranty. The manufacturer told us: there is nothing wrong with the lift, but you guys are constantly pressing the close door button, this breaks the lift! So obviously our abuse of the lift was not going to be covered under warranty.
We called their bluff we had the mechanic disable the close button. The lift still broke. A week later the entire control system was replaced (under warranty) and the lift has functioned normally ever since, though they never enabled the close door button again... :-(
The idea that pressing the door-close button would constitute "abuse" is laughable. If it's actually a self-destruct button by design, it should be locked out by default.
> The manufacturer was trying to get out of a warranty claim, hoping the customer was naive enough to believe their story
To be fair, I worked in the service industry for many years (as a controls technician), and I had many co-workers who intentionally set up long cons like this to stay busy. They would come up with equally outlandish reasons for why they needed to keep going back and upper management was mostly clueless as to how ridiculous they were.
Every pushbutton has a limited number of times you can press it. A close door button is usually pressed many times by impatient passengers. So it will wear out more quickly than any other button.
1) Buttons themselves have on the order of hundreds of thousands to millions of presses expected before any form of failure could begin to be expected. OPs story of a new lift failing would not even come close with a person standing there 24/7 mashing the button
2) A button failing would be just that: a failed button. Not an entirely failed control system. One would assume the button to be a Normally-Open activation, such that continuity in the circuit is achieved when the button press occurs so a failed button would look to be like a button that hasn't been presssed anyway. I'd be happy to be corrected on this, but a Normally Closed button is often only really used for safety sake where a break in the line, loss of voltage, or a button press are all treated equally by the control system.
> you guys are constantly pressing the close door button, this breaks the lift
Even if it did, how can this be an excuse? It is obvious such a button is intended to be used for normal operation. The person answering that was probably clueless and/or desperate, any excuse would have worked better: the occasional overload, superficial and unrelated damage, kids jumping and mashing buttons, etc...
I guess such tactics may work on naive consumers, but I hope building managers know better than to fall for such bullshit. Case in point, yours didn't.
I was recently in El Salvador and the hotel (Hyatt Centric San Salvador) had ThyssenKrupp elevators with door close buttons that actually worked! Presumably no ADA minimum times enforced there.
And it was amazing! Well, as amazing as such a thing can be - to push a button and have immediate feedback/response (it also felt like the doors even closed faster than they do here).
Pushing a button and having it do nothing is one of those frustrating little indignities, it’s bad with software and it’s even worse in the real world.
Some kind of feedback could probably help a lot. On a device with a screen you'd disable the button and maybe add some kind of countdown to show when you can press it. There's a bunch of ways to show this with physical buttons but I guess they'd all be varying amounts of non-cheap.
On the other hand, while living in El Salvador, there were two things I missed from other country's elevators.
- The star symbol sign the main floor button like in the U.S.
- The European floor numbering system.
It's just that some architects here get too creative in Latin America and name their floors S2, S1, PB, MZ, 2, 3 so it's not always clear which floor is the main one.
We’re all obsessing here about the door close button while a surprisingly large number habe trouble understanding the up/down buttons. Surprisingly often, especially elderly people seem to think „if the elevator is currently above me, I have to push „down“ because I want it to go down to pick me up“.
That's a pretty funny but insightful perspective tbh. It shows a good ability to spatially reason. Or maybe it reflects the way certain people view technological devices - they issue direct commands, rather than tell it what they want and let it figure out how to do it.
This reminds me about how humans may naturally think of numbers in logarithms[1] and the way we teach math is a lot of pushing back against that intuition and getting people to think about it the unintuitive way
Another common occurrence that makes me mad is people who want to go UP entering an elevator that's going DOWN, when the downward traveling elevator stops due to some people (coming from the upper floors) exiting it.
I've done that during exceptionally busy times, like dorm moving day. If I wait for the elevator to be going my way on its return, it will already be full and I'll be left standing in the hall.
Of course, I think everyone's probably done it at least once simply due to inattentiveness.
I'm confused. Elevator is going DOWN. Person wants to go UP. Presses UP button and elevator stops and lets someone off (not in response to a call). Person who wants to go UP doesn't notice it wasn't a call response and gets in elevator and notices it is going DOWN. Waits the entire DOWN cycle and then presses desired floor button. Elevator is now in UP mode.
Also if there are multiple elevators, the one you actually called might stop unnecessarily.
Overall it's the same amount of stops regardless whether you take the right or the wrong one. But for some reason being in an elevator that stops without anyone getting in or out irks me.
The residential elevators here in Japan always show the floor the elevator is currently on. They also have a monitor showing who (or what) is inside the elevator car, so you're not surprised when the door opens. (The monitor isn't always on each floor though, but always on the ground floor.) They also have a "pet" button so dog owners can warn people they have an animal in the elevator.
I've seen it fairly frequently in residential buildings in Toronto. Usually the main floor has a current floor indicator but often the other floors don't. Minor cost savings probably?
Most ones I've seen here in Finland (and Scandinavia generally, perhaps most of Europe) it's coloured green. Like exit (and emergency-exit) signs, to show “this is the way out of the building”.
And before anyone goes raging about “ableism against the colourblind!”, that's usually much darker than the rest of them, so it stands out anyway.
I love Radiolab as entertainment podcasting, but it's worth knowing that they're surface-skimming their topics and frequently make meaningful errors on the details.
I recall vaguely a story they did about how it was hard to walk straight while blindfolded and how weird that was, and I immediately flashed back to a college professor demonstrating this in a controls theory class... But as a proof of how inaccuracy mounts in an open-loop control system, because that's actually entirely expected (the odds random error would sum consistently to zero is what would be weird and unexpected).
Also, consider what would happen if door close buttons really did what people think they want: to close the door immediately, unilaterally, and without limitation.
If elevators allowed that, then as soon as the doors started to open, a selfish elevator rider would think "sorry, you losers out there in the elevator lobby, I gotta get to floor 7 ASAP, so you can take the next one" and push the button.
So common sense says the button is only going to let you fine tune how long the door stays open, not have complete control. So you shouldn't conclude from the fact that it doesn't give you complete control that it must not do anything.
I used to work in an old office building with a long wait and where the 'close' button did not seem to do anything, but pushing and releasing the 'open' button would cause the doors to open to their full extent and then immediately begin closing, regardless of how long the doors had been open. Thus, it functioned as a 'close' button.
I did not see it being abused, but I don't know if many people had found out about it. I did not use it unless the lobby was empty of people heading for the elevators.
The buttons work here in our office building and many other places. Some wait for the door to be fully open first and then allow immediate closing. That would solve your issue.
Some do actually stop opening and close the doors halfway through. Never once seen someone do that.
I mean if you are gonna be a dick, you can shove people out of the elevator anyway. No need for a button.
> I mean if you are gonna be a dick, you can shove people out of the elevator anyway. No need for a button.
Seems like the same principle behind online trolling or road rage: putting a layer of tech and/or anonymity between the person and their victim makes it easier for people to be cruel to each other.
I used to work in a building where the elevators operated this way, and riders sometimes DID push the close door button immediately, assuming there was no one waiting to go up and closing the door on people waiting.
In many elevators, you can push the call button again to counter the close. You may have to hold it down until the doors have closed before they'll open again.
However, I would advise against it as you'll then be in a closed space with someone who likely didn't want your company anyway.
You can always stick your hand in the door and trigger the safety mechanism. The close button will not override an obstacle in the door, and in any modern elevator the door does not close with enough force that a normal person cannot hold it open if necessary.
I can confirm from my experience that unrestricted door close buttons lead exactly to this - riders closing the doors without waiting for others to board.
That's a leap. The door will close in seconds anyway. The button is locked out until the minimum time has elapsed. The window between those two times is the only place the button could work. Is it 1 second? 2 seconds?
So the door close button, by regulation, can do little or nothing
Note that the ADA regulations quoted in the article specifically talk about open/close timing in the context of opening and closing in response to calls.
Once the minimum open time has been reached and the minimum time from until start of closing has been reached there should be no further limits on open/close timing under those regulations as written for the rest of that car's stay at that floor.
I've seen elevators that do implement at that way. Once the first open finishes and the first close starts the "open" and "close" buttons both act immediately.
This comes in useful when the elevator arrives, people get off and on, and then as the doors close someone running down the hall shouts asking to hold the elevator. Someone inside can press "open" to reverse the closing, and then as soon as the person gets in a press of "close" resumes closing (even if the door had not yet finished opening).
I think if you've never left the USA you would obviously think that there was some sort of conspiracy to install fake elevator door close buttons, since there is absolutely no feedback in the system that would help an uninformed layperson realize that the door IS closing but on a several second delay. When I lived in China, EVERY elevator door close button worked, and worked instantly. This led to exactly the behavior you would expect, of selfish people getting in elevators and immediately shutting them to hurry on towards their destination. This is not possible in America, where the ADA requires the 3-second minimum delay explained in this article so that e.g. people in wheelchairs have time to get into the lift. So it's not the case that our American elevator door close buttons are placebos, but they ARE doing a terrible job of informing users what they are doing and why.
Exactly my experience in China, as well as in Singapore where I live.
The hack I learned is that the call buttons on the outside also function as door-open buttons once the lift has arrived, so it can override the jerk inside pounding the close button.
I think the Door Close button should be able to override the minimum ADA wait time. What are we worried about? People intentionally closing the door while disabled people are trying to make their way to the elevator door? I expect that's a nearly non-existent problem.
I've seen people hit the door close button immediately as an elevator arrived at a floor or immediately as they enter it, no matter who is waiting behind them. It doesn't work, but they try it anyway.
If you allow the button to do that, quite a few people would abuse it.
In my opinion, there are enough bad actors to justify preventing them from abusing the system.
Perhaps that is due to them mistakenly thinking that there is a delay between pressing the button and the door closing (rather then a minimum time the door is open) so they might as well press it early.
The solution is simple: have cameras in all the elevators in the city, all connected to an AI control system, which observes all the people using the elevators and their use of the buttons. The AI system determines which people are assholes abusing the door-close button, and ignores the button when they press it. As a bonus, it frequently ignores them if they're the only person requesting an elevator, and sometimes locks them in the elevator for a few minutes when they're riding alone, and then alters the video footage to hide this occurrence, so they look insane when they complain about it.
Ok, it might be a little bit of a challenge. But I think the results would be worth it.
In addition, the elevators should all have microphones and speakers in them, so the AI control system can talk to the asshole inside. When he demands to let out, the AI can say, "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do."
People intentionally closing the door while disabled people are trying to make their way to the elevator door? I expect that's a nearly non-existent problem.
People are assholes. Also, a lot of people would just get into the habit of hitting the door close button the moment they step on without even looking for anyone else.
In my building (northern Europe) the doors are open for quite a while (maybe ten seconds). The door-close button closes immediately on push, as long as nothing/no-one is entering/leaving the elevator.
If it didn’t, I’d use the elevator even less than I do. Stairs to/from the third floor is just about the same time as the elevator.
Right. Throughout Europe and the UK, the "door close" button usually does exactly that. Unless something is blocking the door, it will close the door immediately.
It's in the US and Canada that the placebo, non-working "door close" button seems to be the norm, due to regulations in those countries.
So why have a "door close" button at all in the US? I guess because most elevator designs/manufacturers have their origins in Europe. ThyssenKrupp (Germany), Kone (Finland), Schindler (Germany), etc. And rather than design a different panel for the European and North American markets, they just have one common design but with the software configured differently.
> So why have a "door close" button at all in the US?
If only the article you're commenting on described in detail a secondary, safety-critical function of that button, maybe we wouldn't have to resort to this kind of speculation.
> So why have a “door close” button at all in the US?
As explicitly stated in the article:
(1) Its a legal and functional requirement for fire service mode, when automatic door closing is completely disabled.
(2) Some users (the article specifically tested hospitals, based on experience of very long normal door hold times there that would suggest their should be a window between the minimum and normal hold time) do, in fact, configure minimum and normal hold time with a window which allows the button to operate.
It’s not a “non-functional button”. Its a button which is functional, but where the variable it controls is often configured by users to have no range of variability.
But I think it’s fair to say that in most US elevator installations, when the elevator is operating in its normal mode (not service or fire mode), the button has no effect.
> But I think it’s fair to say that in most US elevator installations, when the elevator is operating in its normal mode (not service or fire mode), the button has no effect.
Not quite. There is both a minimum door hold time and a door hold time. If the door hold time is longer than the minimum door hold time, the close door button works after the minimum door hold time. Only if these times are the same does the button effectively do nothing.
The article explains that door close may function in some scenarios and special modes, like independent service mode.
Maintenance put one elevator into this mode to help us with moving in. The elevator stayed open at the floor until door close was pressed and held long enough for the doors to close at which time it became eligible to move to the specified floor.
The panel isn't really much of an argument. Elevators allow many configurations in amount of floors, floors requiring special permission, ... so they have to provide a bunch of panels anyways.
Same in my building, in the US. I have noticed that the time between the arrival signal and the doors being fully opened is surprisingly long, however (maybe 7 seconds), so the ADA requirement is met even when the elevator allows you to close the doors immediately.
Other fun facts:
- you can push and hold the door close button before the doors have fully opened, and once they get all the way open they will immediately close.
- a couple months ago, the door close button broke and my daughters and I noticed it *immediately* and it was actually fixed within a couple weeks.
Another thing that is probably specific to Europe are elevators with retrofitted carriage doors that originally had only shaft doors. In this case the carriage doors are usually motorized, while the shaft doors are not. And in this case the close door button makes significant difference.
Personally, don’t really care or use the door close button. However, would so much love it if I press a floor by accident, the second press deselects it.
Those buttons look like they're in some place other than the US (I think we have two types of buttons here, but I'm not enough of an elevator nerd to explain why). In Japan I've seen the double-click to undo pretty much everywhere. The door close buttons also work.
I could be wrong but I think the ADA was a little overzealous. 99% of the time there isn't someone with low mobility trying to walk over to the elevator. The 1% of the time someone is having trouble, I've never seen them pound the door close button; they hold their hand to block the light curtain until they get in. (When the elevator starts beeping and doing the slow-close thing, that's when I take my hand out. I've never seen anyone's hand get crushed in the elevator, but you can tell it wants blood.)
My anecdotal experience matches the conclusion… that internet-urban myths are born of poor regurgitation of glorified content marketing; and also that most door close buttons work after a minimum time threshold. Interesting to learn it’s part of the ADA. Neat newsletter, I subscribed.
Most of the online pieces about door close buttons I can find appear to be based solely on the 2016 NYTimes article and actually repeat the claim about the placebo affect more strongly than the NYTimes originally makes it. In other words, the "fact" that the door close button is a placebo seems to mostly just be a product of lazy journalists rewriting an NYTimes piece enough to not feel like plagiarists.
I hate that this has become the norm for journalism where only one person does any actual research, and then tons of other outlets paraphrase it and publish their own version. It devalues the work (why would you go through the trouble of actual research when you can just rip off someone else?), makes it difficult to tell where the story actually came from, and it pollutes the search space with dozens of copies of the same story each with slightly less connection to the original source material.
Anecdotally, the near dozen or so elevators I've regularly used in Canada (both in residential and commercial settings) have had their Door Close button work as you'd expect: near instantly – no three-or-more second minimum imposed for the doors to be open.
> In other words, there may be some period during which pushing the door close button causes the door to close, but it will be after the end of the ADA-required minimum door time.
The button mashers were right all along! I'd always thought it was futile to keep pressing the close-door button, but it sounds like if you "mash" it you're more likely to hit that sweet spot where the button is active.
Sounds like they should light up the close door button after the ADA required time to indicate when the button is active (rather than the status quo in which the functionality is illegible).
Yeah I never really got why people made that claim. In my experience, the door close button works fine after some minimum amount of time. Elevators I've used that are primarily for folks with significant mobility issues or maybe where they're carrying a lot of stuff, like for a Hotel catering kitchen, seem to stay open a bit longer. In one hotel I used to get Zipcars from a lot, the elevator to the parking garage would stay open for like 30 seconds if you didn't hit the door close button. It was like that for well over a decade so I doubt it was just misconfigured. Elevators in professional or residential buildings that need to optimize for the number of trips just have a different use case, so the door closes much more quickly.
I had always wondered where the "placebo" myth came from, because I've been in so many elevators where the door close button obviously works. Great article!
The elevator in a building I lived in had a feature, presumably for emergency responders, where holding the door close and a floor number simultaneously for a few seconds would take you directly to that floor. I believe that method has been replaced with a standardized keyed override. The trick did come in handy once when a bratty kid pushed all the buttons as a prank.
I'm not sure where I learned it, but I've found that in many older elevators in the US, pressing door close simultaneously with the floor number will also get the doors to close immediately.
This seems like an unintentional side-effect of bad wording in the ADA. The intent is obviously to give people enough time to enter an elevator before its door closes automatically, but I don't think they had in mind restricting the manual close functionality when they wrote that sentence. If they had added to it to read "...start to close without intervention shall be..." , we wouldn't need to have this whole discussion.
Relatedly, in the past I've been on a (very old) elevator, which just waited with the doors open at the last floor it was called to, and didn't even have a close nor open button for the doors. Selecting a floor, and possibly calls from other floors, would close them automatically, and they would open when the elevator arrived at its destination.
I mostly agree with the first addendum, though one could imagine an impatient patron at a hotel mashing the "door close" button to the chagrin of say an elderly person walking towards the elevator.
It definitely varies a lot in the US. There are benefits to being curious and playing around with things vs just believing every factoid you here.
The article discusses some of the various configs and rules pretty well. After reading about the distance requirements, it's unsurprising to me that smaller apartment buildings or lobbies are where I've most frequently seen "more responsive" door close buttons. It was pretty damn quick in my old apartment, probably tiny lobby + not super fast door opening so the minimum was eaten into by the time from "ding" to "fully open."
I used to see people visibly surprised that it worked when I used it in that building!
("Push to cross" buttons have the same sort of fun, but with slightly more potential consequence for the people who seem to refuse to ever push them...)
There are functional crosswalk buttons in NYC. They're located at busy intersections with low foot traffic where it's advantageous to extend phases for turning lanes when nobody needs to walk through.
When I was in Japan, I realized that there (compared to Europe) elevators where much more "aggressive", they bip if you hold the open button and after about a minute, the door start closing slowly even if you hold the open button pressed. And there, the close button definitely work and will close the door immediately.
Of course I make some generalities as it depends but it is my general memory of Japanese elevators. Also you can "deactivate" Floor button by double tap or hold if you pressed the wrong one.
Based on my experience, the door close button seems to work as expected at my office. Press the button, and the doors close much more quickly than they usually do.
As for crossing buttons... generally they do work in the UK. It's just that if the crossing is in the middle of a normal road (read, where there's no reason for the lights to change automatically) it's required, whereas if the crossing is at a junction, it'll merely display the signal to cross whenever the lights would be set to change anyway.
The reference to crossing buttons not working I found particularly annoying because my experience here in Seattle is, except at the busiest intersections, you do in fact need to press the buttons, otherwise the crosswalk won't show the walking man for you, even if traffic is in fact stopped in the relevant direction. (Of course, the article points out this was meant to be only about NYC)
Particularly obnoxiously, if you are even a millisecond late in pressing the button (traffic just got the red light), you won't get the walking man until the next cycle.
I did some research into European elevator codes and got the impression that depending on country there was either DO/DC or a single Door Hold button - but it seems like the labeling on DH might be identical to DO on some elevators which creates sort of a philosophical question as to if they're really different things. Still, you can find elevators with DO, DH, and DC it seems, and in that case I have no idea what the difference is between DO and DH. It's kind of hard to cover this stuff in Europe as the degree of variation from country to country is pretty high, so pretty much any rule you state won't apply in some major city that people will bring up.
Perhaps I should have been more explicit, but in general I hope the discussion of ADA and the ASME code makes it clear that I'm talking about the US. Actually the ASME code mostly applies directly to Canada as well as a separate but harmonized code.
I know the article isn’t really about door close buttons but after just coming back from Japan I can confirm that every door close button did exactly what you’d expect it to.
Living in Japan, I can confirm that elevator door close buttons tend to work much more immediately than in the US. Also, the doors themselves are more aggressive, so it's inadvisable to try to stop the door with your hand.
These two things combined lead to an elevator culture where somebody will usually hold the door open button until everybody gets in, then press the door close button. Efficient.
The "door close" button might be an override to the "long open" button in some elevators. Then, it might appear as unconnected for the regular use case.
That's basically what the article says: elevator doors (in the US) have a minimum open time, as specified by the ADA, and try to close as soon as this minimum time is reached. The close button can't override the minimum, so generally it seems like the button does nothing.
Meanwhile, some elevators (hospitals are the example given) do hold the door open longer than the minimum, and the close button works in those places, per their testing.
The lesson here is that often these "serious" programs are still entertainment and are not rigorous and you should always retain some skepticism and not believe what they say verbatim. This includes things like Myth Busters and so on. I'm not saying they are lying on purpose, but they have schedules and expectations to fulfill, so they may stray from time to time.
They are totally connected, they just start door close before waiting of a usual timeout which gets annoying. At least here in EU, if i pressed the floor button i will wait a few seconds before it starts closing doors, if i press floor button then "door close" then, unless something is blocking the door, they start closing immediately.
True story: when I was in college I was at a crosswalk waiting for a walk signal, and two people walked up. One of them started pressing the walk button furiously, and she said, "It won't change unless you press it a bunch of times really fast." When the walk signal lit up about ten seconds later she said, "See?"
I definitely would try to convince people of random incorrect technological things when I was younger (like high school). That sounds exactly like something I would have done...
Not only that, but the text is a tiny sliver of horizontal space, with that annoying background filler everywhere else. It's so bad I had to break out the ruler just to be sure: My monitor is 24 inches across, and at my default text size, the content of that site is 6 inches across: 3/4 of the screen wasted. This web developer needs a paddlin'.
It's pretty common for hospitals to have long maximum close times but short minimums: the former as an accommodation, and the later because occasionally patients need to be transported as quickly as possible.
The door close button very obviously does something on those elevators.
I think I've noticed in Japan, people hit the door close button on the way out of the elevator if no one is standing outside to enter. Can anyone verify if this is etiquette in Japan? Are there other places that have certain etiquette that outsiders may not be aware of?
A less known feature of some crosswalk buttons is that some have accessibility features. I've seen a few that were pointless when pressed due to automatic triggering. Long-press and you'll get longer time and an audible indicator while crossing.
In downtown Minneapolis, the whole of downtown is on computer controlled traffic light grid, so the crosswalk buttons don't change any of the timing of the traffic light grid.
But on all the ADA upgraded intersections, the crosswalk buttons DO start announcing the count down time, and what intersection they are at.
So, they do something, but they won't change the time it takes the light to actually change.
This exemplifies the utility of greying things out in a UI.
Elevator buttons should be illuminated, but only when available. That would be a cool way to see exactly when and if the thing becomes useful, and save the user some annoyance.
Kind of off topic... but after ~20 years of using *nix, the the graphic in the background finally explained to me why it's called the "shell". Mind blown.
A crosswalk button that does nothing is a placebo even if that wasn't the original intent.
The elevator button is more complicated but I think the typical uselessness combined with misleading label is enough to qualify. The reason it exists isn't placebo, but the way it's set up makes it a placebo, even if it's via negligence.
The term "placebo" implies intent. So saying something is "a placebo even if that wasn't the original intent" is like saying something "is red even if it isn't that color."
What a pointlessly elaborate way of arriving at the conclusion that the button actually doesn't work.
Sorry, but from the POV of the user one does not care whether it's the "elevator controller" blocking the input or the button is not connected at all. The end result is the same - you walk into the elevator, press the button, and nothing happens. Hitting an annoyed user with an anecdotal "actually if the door hold timer was longer the button would work just fine!!!" doesn't help in the slightest.
I take it as a push back against the mildly conspiratorial thinking that elevator companies left in an explicitly non-functioning button for the sake of giving people a sense of control.
That's a bit like saying your computer's shutdown sequence "doesn't work" because it prioritizes ending processes gracefully before actually powering off the computer.
No, it's like having a computer that's already in the shutdown sequence and somebody puts a magical button in front of you and says if you press this it's going to turn the computer off. Then when you press it nothing changes because the computer is already shutting down waiting for the processes to stop.
Bottom line: "Door close" is not universally useful to all people.
On some elevators, it's programmed to actually close the doors for a regular passenger.
On some elevators, it's programmed to only respond to firefighters, janitors, or other people who have the ability to put the elevator into a local control mode.
It varies from building to building. Everything else is a placebo.
The "bottom line" is that such poorly-researched, context-free articles are written to get you to click (see the NYT example), and then something contextual to NYC (crosswalk buttons) get generalized to the whole nation. And then, true or not, people think elevator close buttons don't do anything.
The article clearly states that the "placebo" theory is baseless, so I'm not sure what your "bottom line" that closes with "everything else is a placebo" comes from. What is "everything else" exactly?
It also gives a lot of fascinating information about elevators in general and specific operation modes.
e.g. there is a "riot mode" where the elevator goes to every floor except the first (or ground in EU) floor aka to the lobby. The idea was that, during a riot, a luxury building in NYC would lock the stairwell access from the lobby but people could still take the elevator to the other floors to visit their neighbors etc