If you’re on the top floor of a building, all the elevators are bound to come up from the bottom and then go down again. If one assumes that the cabin does not remain on the top floor, but turns around directly, then the following picture emerges on the penultimate floor: A cabin travels up and shortly afterwards down again. The time interval between a car going up and a car going down is therefore extremely short. If you now call the elevator at a random time, the probability of catching an ascending car first is higher. However, if you stay at the elevator without getting on and keep a log of all trips for hours or possibly days, you will of course find that on average there are just as many cars going up as down.
Conversely, the same applies to low floors. If a building does not have a basement, a cabin always arrives from above on the ground floor and then continues its journey upwards. Therefore, the time interval (if the car does not stay on the ground floor) on the first floor between an elevator going down and an elevator going up is very small. Because of this, you are more likely to encounter a descending elevator first.
Frankfurt Skyline | The MainTor site with the WINX Tower (with the illuminated spikes above) in Frankfurt am Main, seen from the south-east (February 2021).
An extremely slow elevator in Frankfurt’s skyline
To understand the whole thing better, you can take a larger building as an example. Imagine you work in the relatively new WINX Tower in Frankfurt, a 30-story skyscraper on the banks of the Main. Suppose there was only one extremely slow elevator that stops at each floor and takes one minute per floor. To ensure that the employees arrive punctually at the respective floors, a timetable has been drawn up with the departure times in the respective directions:
So if you work on the first floor and don’t know about this timetable yet and therefore get on the elevator at any time, then the first car you encounter will go down – unless you show up exactly on the hour or a minute later at the elevator. In 29 out of 30 cases, the elevator will go down first. The situation is similar with your colleagues on the 29th floor.