That looks bonkers expensive. Some slabs of aluminium there that will need to be engineered more before that is financially viable.,(reply>), Don't forget, the maintanance of such elevators is going to be expensive as hell, there are cables and electrical boxes throughout whole shaft. It has more electronics and moving parts than regular elevator technician could handle. And I doubt technicians could learn to maintain it by reading some manual book. Companies will have to hire engineers just to maintain it. Also the more moving parts, the more its prone for faults.,(reply>), And you can take cars from one shaft to another, so if you want a car to go down, you can get an empty car from the up shaft to move sideways to the down shaft, cars can pass each other too.,(reply>), Jacob Shepley if it fails at the top, at least the passengers will have plenty of time to call their loved ones.,(reply>), it will also be able to go from the bottom to the very top of any building. other sky scrapers can require you get out of the elevator just to enter another to continue up the building. having a couple of these cable-less elevator tracks, each having multiple cars, would improve elevator design in tall skyscrapers massively,(reply>), For tall enough buildings, these elevators would result in slightly cheaper space inside, not a price hike.  It's called the Elevator Conundrum.  Basically, the taller you make the building, the more elevators you need.  Each elevator shaft takes up space on every floor it passes through, (whether it stops there or not,) which means that at a certain point it's impractical to build any higher, because your building would start to be mostly elevators.  (Instead of, you know, stuff you actually want in your building, like offices and stuff.)  <br><br>But if your elevators can move sideways, you can have all your upward bound elevators on the same shaft, and all your ones going down on another.  This increases the amount of available floor space you get for the same construction costs, which would easily offset the expense of the fancier elevators.