Oddly enough here's an interesting "elevator story".
One of the courses I teach is in a classroom 11 flights up. Though the building is new there are only two, slow operating elevators, which frequently break down, serving the building. Often there is a long line at the elevator. From my teen years, when I first started biking everywhere I also built the habit to take the stairs whenever possible. Avoiding escalators and elevators. I basically take elevators and escalators due to social pressure, nothing kills a conversation more than when you tell a friend mid-conversation, "I'm going to take the stairs." So in cases when I am with other people I take the machine. It's made me a kind of closeted stair climber. I do it when I am solo.
But probably 60- 70% of the time I climb the 11 flights, twice a day to teach my class. Most of the students have had no idea I do this. On some days when I've climbed them particularly fast or I'm carrying a lot of stuff, I'll pause in the hallway to catch my breath before I enter the room.
Every once in a while a student or two will figure it out and, in the past, I've been joined by other students, most often for fitness, one young woman was training for the Boston Marathon. This semester a young man started climbing them regularly after he saw me doing it. But one day the elevators were particularly slow and almost the entire class was down in the lobby waiting for the elevator. They saw me shoot into the stairwell and I heard one of them ask, "Is he taking the stairs?!" I was surprised to hear a couple of students say, "He does it all the time."
Well, I got about three flights up when I heard the whole group of them come into the stairwell and begin to climb. A couple of them turned it into a race but most of them just plodded up talking and resting occasionally. The last one up was a girl who'd seen them filing up but hadn't known it was precipitated by my climb. When she arrived, breathless and panting, she looked at me and said, "Hey, you wanna good workout? Take those stairs all the way up from the bottom floor!!- it's a killer."
After that students began taking the stairs with some regularity. Not all the time and not all of them. But it became a "thing" last semester. It kind of caught on and I would occasionally hear boasts of students having "taken the stairs".
What interests me is that there are reasons why they do it that parallel the bike thing.
1- "The exercise"- it's exhilarating. They get a good workout without going to the gym. And I'm sure they think about it next time they're at a gym and using the stair master.
2- it does save some electrical energy and some of them are environmentally conscious.
3-peer pressure. It had a certain cache with some students and it got in vogue to take the stairs.
4- a lack of dependability of the higher tech infrastructure. The elevators are crowded and sometimes unreliable.
Anyway, just two cents on the whole elevator thing. It's anecdotal and not "data driven" so easily dismissable but..
On another front here is the latest Boston Bike count just released.
The areas with the highest percentage of increase, 200+%, happen to be in areas with new bike lanes and other infrastructure.
http://www.bostonbikes.org/2014/01/2...n-bike-counts/