You know they’re dangerous when they have a little prayer built right into the name.
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I was on a rickety freight elevator with no walls or doors, just a shaky as hell platform. That was scary enough for me.
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Adding this to the bucketlist. This is the best thing ever. I want one.
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I love that the discussion immediately turned towards Shabbos elevators, because I first heard about these as a Shomer Shabbos teenager and immediately wanted to ride one, and was disappointed to find that they no longer existed in the US.
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They don’t roll on the Shabbos
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I’m on mobile and I don’t want to scroll through all the replies so I don’t know if someone has pointed this out yet:
This is just an escalator with boxes instead of steps.
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Thanks for ruining this for me. For a moment there I was really excited about living again.
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Escalators are far less likely to decapitate you.
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There are some interesting one-person sized “elevators” in some parking garages in the NYC but they are only for the workers 
Edit: It’s just like the “man lift” video you posted – maybe not same company, but same idea.
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Evil
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Could be, but I’ve never seen a two-sided escalator with up and down on the same belt.
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But losing toes or even feet doesn’t sound like much fun, either.
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On the bright side, you can now look at every escalator you see and think “that’s a really advanced and well-designed continuous button-free elevator”, and pretend that stairs and ladders don’t exist.
A mode of transportation I would actually like to see in public buildings: slides.
The building codes would be very strict, and the number of people at a given time is limited, but still, they would be cool.
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I also suggest people movers in hallways. I love walking on those to go really fast.
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Indeed. Not saying escalators aren’t dangerous – just there’s less of a decapitation risk.
Personal anecdote time: as a kid of maybe 10 years old on the escalator down from the train platform at the El Cerrito del Norte BART station, it managed to suck down both of my shoes. (I’m not sure how that happened but I would guess some Final Destination style shit occurred with a shoelace or something.)
I was able to get my feet out before something really bad happened to me.
It managed to impressively destroy my shoes.
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Oh yeah, they are still common here in Germany. The Poelzig Bau, the massive main building of the Frankfurt University still has about 4 of these thing alone. They are fun!
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oh man! that is one of my favorite things about airports!!!
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More recent paternoster lifts have sensors to detect if someone isn’t completely within the car as it moves away from the floor, stopping the lift if you aren’t keeping your hands and feet inside the car at all times except in the window of space where it’s safe to board or disembark. Older lifts may have a resistance sensor that stops the lift when something impedes its travel. The oldest lifts, like a lot of old tech, just expected you not to do anything especially careless, much like the old fans and saws without safety guards.
The name “paternoster” is interesting, too. It comes from the first two words of the Christian Lord’s Prayer in Latin: “Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum” which means “Our Father who is in Heaven, holy be your name.” The elevator is called by this name because the chain of connected cars is reminiscent of the connected beads of a rosary, with the Lord’s Prayer being one of the prayers said while praying in concert with the beads.
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Dangerous? You haven’t seen dangerous until you’ve visited that mine in Cornwall where the elevator basically consists of two narrow ladders side by side. The left one moves up a certain distance as the right one moves down and vice-versa. You use this by stepping onto the left one when it is at the bottom of its range of travel and go up, then when it is at the top you step onto the right one which at that moment is at the bottom of its range of travel to go up some more before stepping back onto the left one, etc.
Of course that was the same mine where the galleries extended out under the sea and ended up so close to the sea floor that when there was a storm up above, the miners could hear the boulders rolling around above them at the bottom of the sea. Workplace safety apparently wasn’t really a huge issue in those times …
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