How buildings move people
A lift and an escalator both move people between floors, and that is where the similarity ends. One carries a batch of people on demand to any level; the other carries a continuous stream between two. We have built a 3D model of each so you can look inside them — then see when a building needs one, the other, a second one, or both. It is the question we are asked most at concept stage, and the most expensive one to get wrong.
Drag the model to orbit it. Send the lift car to a landing, run the escalator up or down, and change the contract speed to see what 1.0, 1.6 and 2.5 m/s actually look like. The third tab puts both in one building and answers the five questions below.
A lift: almost always, and earlier than you think
If the building has more than one storey and anyone other than the owner uses it, assume a lift. The National Construction Code and the Disability (Access to Premises) Standards require an accessible path of travel to the levels people are entitled to reach, and a stair is not one. Beyond compliance there is furniture, deliveries, prams, and the tenant with a broken ankle. At concept stage the question is rarely whether — it is how many, how big and how fast.
A second lift: sooner than most owners expect
Two things move a building from one lift to two. The first is availability: a single lift out of service — a breakdown, a scheduled inspection, a modernisation that takes it out for weeks — puts everyone above the ground floor on the stairs. As a rule of thumb, once a residential building passes about five levels or forty apartments, two lifts is the conversation we expect to have for that reason alone.
The second is traffic: when the round-trip time of one car pushes the average interval past the targets in the PCA guide and CIBSE Guide D, waiting becomes a daily complaint. Two smaller lifts almost always outperform one large one on both counts — and a traffic analysis, not a rule of thumb, is what settles it.
An escalator: when the flow is heavy and two-level
An escalator earns its place when a large number of people move between two adjacent levels continuously — a retail podium, a transport interchange, a stadium concourse, a food court above the mall. Over a one-storey rise a single 1000 mm escalator moves people at a rate no lift bank can match, with nobody waiting, and in retail its visibility is a design tool in itself: it pulls customers to the upper level.
Units are usually installed in pairs so one runs up and one down, and reversed at close of trade to clear the building. Below a few thousand people an hour between those two levels, a good lift bank and a generous stair are cheaper to buy, run and maintain.
Both: the usual answer
Most buildings that ask the question need both. The escalator carries the crowd between the two levels that generate it; the lift serves everyone who cannot use an escalator and every level it does not reach. An escalator never removes the need for a lift — but a lift bank sized to carry a retail peak on its own will be oversized, expensive, and still queued at lunchtime.
A moving walk: same idea, flatter
Where the flow is heavy but the rise is small — a carpark up to a supermarket, a long airport concourse, a shopping centre split-level — an inclined or horizontal moving walk carries the trolleys, prams and luggage an escalator cannot take. Same drive, same truss, same maintenance profile, and the same rule: it does not replace the lift.
Which one your building needs
The design question is not usually which, but how many, how big, and how fast. That is settled by traffic analysis against the population the building will actually carry, not by copying the building next door. We do that work independently of any lift company, so the answer is not shaped by whose equipment is being sold.
Open the full explainer, with the side-by-side comparison of speed, capacity, rise, accessibility and maintenance — or ask us about a traffic study.