“Vertical Walking” is an experimental prototype designed by a Netherlands company “Rombout Frieling Lab”. It uses human power to allow movement between floors of a building with only ten percent of the effort needed to climb stairs and without the need for any external power.
The price of urban land is skyrocketing. And another 3 billion people are expected to live in cities: we will be forced to exploit vertical space.
Yet, our populations are ageing and staircases become major bottlenecks. Lifts are rarely a good alternative as they rely on significant external power, they deprive us from daily exercise and are expensive and intrusive to install.
The “Vertical Walking” prototype has been succesfully tested by a wide range of users including an amputee and an MS sufferer. They found it ‘incredibly cool’.
Vertical Walking uses a system of upright rails that incorporate pulleys and a clever gripping system to allow a user to incrementally move between floors in a building
The major draw back of this system is, only one person can use it at a time. Anyway, we can put many Vertical walking systems as they don’t need much space.
