[jleader]

I used to work in a 50-story building that had banks of elevators, each of which was hard-coded to only visit the lobby and the appropriate range of floors. For example, the first bank would only visit 2-13, the 2nd bank would visit 14-25, etc. The elevator cars only had buttons inside for the floors they were allowed to visit. There were also a couple service/freight elevators that could visit all floors (including a couple of service/equipment floors that weren't reachable at all by the normal elevators), and had a human operator/guard who logged badge numbers, floors, and property-removal authorization forms.

I think this sort of elevator allocation is fairly common for tall buildings, because it's horribly inefficient for people going to the 44th floor to have to wait while people get on and off at all of the 42 floors in between!

[caf]

In very tall buildings, to reach the highest floors you might have to take an express car to a higher lift lobby, where you change cars (because it's also inefficient for the 2-13 lift to have an empty shaft that's never used for 80 floors above 13).