Upon learning that California, unlike some other states, didn’t have a database of its elevators, Petaluma resident and elevator hobbyist Logan Ober developed his own. The Press Democrat reports that Ober, who also has elevator YouTube and Instagram pages, submitted a public records request and paid around US$50 for a massive amount of elevator data to be compiled and sent to him. From there, he built an online database that lets users search by city, conveyance number, speed, capacity, machine type and install date, among other information.
A longtime elevator enthusiast, Ober has traveled to San Francisco and Santa Rosa, California, and even Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to ride and take video recordings of lifts. He says his affinity for elevators and interest in their workings and specifications comes naturally. “I’m on the autism spectrum, so I have weird hobbies with planes and things like that. Just the mechanics of how they work,” Ober told The Press Democrat.
Ober hopes that the state will become interested in hosting a site like his, or better yet, his own site. A representative from the California Department of Industrial Relations said that the state has focused resources on its elevator inspection program instead of creating and maintaining a public database. For now, Ober will continue to request updated data from the state (at a cost) every six months and keep optimizing the site, which he wants to offer indefinitely as a resource to the community.
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