But I assure you, it was not in fact pointless. No, we wanted to get a better sense of the relative usage of elevators vs stairs at the West Campus Garage, a site of much comings and goings, where it is easy to observe people's movement habits. In watching this we hoped find patterns which would be interesting or could be used to help improve the parking garage's efficiency and utility.
At first we thought we would try to observe several elevator/stairway sets and count how many people used one versus the other, how far they travelled and whether they were female or male (the only personal trait distinguishable from a distance). However after a few minutes we realized that one person could not watch both a set of stairs and an elevator, so we had to limit our observations to a single set: those on the North-East corner of the garage. Even with two people this was difficult, as we had to both take notes and track people as they moved from floor to floor. However once we had 3 people on one set of elevators and stairs, we were successful.
We watched the garage over the course of one day at three different times of day. We tried to catch the busiest hours: 8, 12 and 5, but were a little bit late for the early morning and early evening. Still I think those would be the best hours, particularly if watched over a whole week (results might differ on TR vs MWF).
In the end a lot of our results were fairly straight forward. The only one of real interest was the cutoff point for stair usage vs elevator. When traveling a distance of 2 floors, a large portion of people used the stairs, but at 3 floors, the percentage almost flipped. I wonder if this is similar to most buildings or specific to the garage.
Well with more watching and data i bet we could find out more.
Personally, I do the same things. I'll take the stairs if I only have to go one or two floors. I'll always take the elevator if it's anything over two. The elevators in the Richardson building are the worst. Everyone seems to get on and then get out on the next floor up/down. Laziness!
ReplyDeleteThe amount of data that you guys collected was amazing. The statistics that you came up with are very interesting as well. Noting the difference in usage between genders was something that I wasn't expecting. I personally used the elevators in Richardson a lot more and I have had several experiences where I needed to get to the 9th floor, but I would take me several minutes because people were constantly getting on and off on every floor in between.
ReplyDeleteGreat job in colllecting all that data. I think it aptly reflects what I would do as a guy. And Josh is so right regarding Richardson. An interesting set of findings.
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