"Skip-Stop Elevators" Top 5 Page for this destination South Korea Transportation Tip by jburron

For those of us used to elevators in the US/Canada, Korea can be a confusing place. Some of the new buildings (especially hotels) have 'regular' elevators where you press one button and there may be one to three banks of elevators servicing blocks of floors (2-20, 21-40, 41-60) but many, many buildings have other systems.

One is skip-stop elevators where one elevator would go to floors 1,3,5,7 and 9 and another would service floors 1,2,4,5,7 and 8. If you want to go to floor 5 from floors 6 you have to either use the stairs or go down to the lobby. I've even seen some that are more convoluted. At the head offices for the National Pension Corporation (Korea's government pension for all citizens that manages in excess of 100 BILLION USD--similar to CalPERS in the US) there are 3 elevators and each one goes to a different set of floors!

Another twist is instead of having one call button for multiple elevators (and having a computer figure out which ones would most efficiently move people up and down), would-be riders can punch the call buttons for individual elevators. This, as you might imagine, leads to people hitting EVERY button in order to guarantee shortest wait...but if everyone does that how can this be so?

Oh, and if the light for 만원/man-won comes on it is not because something costs 10,000 won--man-won also means "full".

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Type: Other

• Updated Jan 14, 2005
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