Elevators

"This exists because elevator wait times feel arbitrary, and the scheduling algorithms behind them are almost never explained."

An interactive article on elevator scheduling — SCAN, LOOK, Otis' RSR, and destination dispatch — with live simulations you can speed up, add traffic to, and benchmark side by side. Ends with a full sandbox sim where you set floors, cars, flow rate and algorithm.

Our takeThe best kind of explainer — you don't read the conclusion, you watch it happen. The counterintuitive bit is that those fancy destination-dispatch kiosks usually make waits worse, because they lock you into one car and the system can't re-optimize. Hard to stop fiddling with the final sim.