Elevator Traffic Analysis Calculator

Round-Trip Time (RTT) has no dependence on Building Population at all -- it's built entirely from Floors above lobby, Car Capacity, Loading Factor, Floor-to-Floor Height, Rated Speed, and Door Open+Close Time, all of which describe how one car behaves on one trip. Building Population only enters later, through Peak 5-Min Demand, to determine how many of those identical round trips are needed to serve the building; it never feeds back into RTT itself. Rated Speed is not a simple "faster is always better" input: a car can only actually reach Rated Speed if a floor is tall enough to accelerate up to it and decelerate again within one floor's travel distance, so the achievable peak speed used for BOTH inter-floor flight time and the per-stop deceleration/acceleration penalty is capped at the square root of (acceleration x Floor-to-Floor Height) -- never the raw Rated Speed directly. At this calculator's default 3.5 m floor height, that cap works out to about 1.87 m/s, well below the default 2.5 m/s Rated Speed, so the car never reaches its rated speed at the defaults, and Rated Speed has zero effect on RTT anywhere from about 1.87 m/s up to the 12 m/s maximum -- it only starts to matter once lowered below that floor-height-dependent threshold, and there it moves flight time and the per-stop penalty together, in lockstep, never independently.

Floors above lobby has the largest effect on RTT across its full declared range of any input, since it drives both the probable number of stops and the total travel distance, and it also moves RTT the most of any input right at the defaults. Floor-to-Floor Height sets the achievable speed cap itself, so a small change to it simultaneously moves flight time and the capped per-stop penalty together -- though at the defaults, Floors, Car Capacity, and Loading Factor each move RTT more per equivalent step. Building Population and Rated Speed are the two inputs that sit on a true plateau at the defaults (Building Population never enters RTT at all; Rated Speed sits below its speed-cap threshold), so a small nudge to either leaves RTT completely unchanged even though Rated Speed matters below that threshold.