Wide How to measure lift waiting times in an existing building
Measure how long people wait from pressing the call button to a car arriving, at the busiest times, on several different days. Record the time, floor, direction and how many people boarded. A week of peak-hour data tells you whether your building has a real capacity problem and where it is.
The numbers that matter
- Average waiting time: from call to car arrival, averaged over a period.
- Longest waits: the worst cases, which drive complaints.
- Interval: the average time between cars leaving the main lobby.
- Handling capacity: the share of the building's population the lifts can move in five minutes at peak.
CIBSE Guide D is the standard reference lift consultants use for these measures. For office buildings, a common benchmark is an interval of about 20 to 30 seconds (Designing Buildings Wiki).
Three ways to measure
- A manual survey. Staff with a stopwatch at the main lobby and a few busy floors during peaks. Cheap and quick, but limited to the times and places you observe.
- Controller data. Ask your elevator service provider for call and trip logs from the controller. Accurate for call times, but it cannot tell you how many people were waiting.
- Sensor or camera counts. Systems such as SES count people waiting and on board continuously, giving you every peak, every day, on a dashboard.
A simple one-week survey
- Pick the peaks: usually 7:00 to 9:00, 12:00 to 14:00 and 17:00 to 19:00.
- Choose the main lobby plus two or three of the busiest floors.
- For each call, record the time the button was pressed, the time a car arrived, the direction, and how many people boarded.
- Note any car that was out of service.
- Repeat on at least five days, including a weekend day for residential buildings.
| Date | Floor | Direction | Call time | Car arrived | Wait (s) | People boarded | Car full? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| e.g. Mon 10 Nov | G | Up | 08:02:10 | 08:03:25 | 75 | 6 | No |
What to do with the results
Compare your averages and worst cases with the benchmark agreed with your lift consultant. If waits are long only at peaks while equipment is healthy, the control logic is the likely bottleneck and an AI retrofit is worth assessing. If cars are frequently out of service, start with maintenance. Read why lifts in Dubai buildings are slow for the usual causes.