An impressive revival of the Mitsubishi spiral escalator product was announced last month in a Shanghai shopping mall. This impressive 12 machine setup stands as the largest spiral escalator arrangement in the world to date.
like so many other things coming from China, it lacks some innovation but it is multiplied to the extent of being amazing. It made its viral way throughout the Internet, witch was probably the main advertisement goal for this incentive. The mall architects created a magnificently disorienting riding experience where riders get off the escalator opposite to the direction they board it, they have to walk around the whole atrium to find the escalator going the other direction (this is good for shopping mall owners, not for transportation) but what can you say? this is truly astonishing.
To bad they used a 30 years old machine design, that sold approximately 110 machine worldwide so far. Mitsubishi sales persons describes it as state of the art wonder, when in fact all engineers involved in its development are all retired or dead (I bet they’d like to see this one… )
We at Helixator hope this kind of projects will raise the awareness and fuel the development of new technologies, where spiral and helical escalators will be a part of our daily 21st century lives. Well done China!
Actually, if you look closely, there are normal escalators near the awesome one. I’m guessing it goes downward if the helical escalator goes upward.