The national gauge
How many elevators are in the United States?
The industry has quoted “one million” for two decades, all of it tracing to a single fact-sheet line. Elevator Radar is assembling the real number from primary sources: every public state and city device registry, one by one, on the record.
registered conveyances accounted for (472,184 elevators)
CERTIFIED AGAINST SOURCE REGISTRIES
68 percent hand-counted from registries, the rest cited by agencies. This accounted figure is the verified floor. Extrapolating the elevator density we measure across the population we already cover puts the real national total at 1,029,224 to 1,321,617, already past the “one million” everyone still repeats. How we model it.
LAST MOVEMENT: +1 ESCALATOR (PARSED) IN NYC: NEW INSTALLATION PERMIT FILED BY OTIS ELEVATOR COMPANY PUBLIC LOG
The rules of the gauge
- No interpolated ticks. If nothing happened, it does not move.
- Every movement is a public log entry with its source.
- New installation permits tick up; removals tick down.
- Ranges, never false precision, for anything modeled.
What moves it
- A new installation permit lands on the scoreboard.
- A state registry refreshes.
- A records request comes back with a state’s data.