I was curious, so I did some research. The fastest elevator in the world, according to Google, is the one in the Shanghai Tower, at 20.5 m/s. Since the Saudis are full of hubris, let's assume that they beat that speed and round up to 21 m/s. That's a 17 second one-way trip. So, 34 seconds for a round trip - with no time accounted for loading/unloading. For the sake of easy math, and again considering hubris, let's round down to 30 seconds per round trip.
Next, how many elevators? Well, the Shanghai Tower has 97 (the Chinese seem to also have an abundance of hubris). Let's round that up to 100 and break the record, and add another digit for those proud Saudis.
Finally, how many people for each elevator? Well, back to Google for that. The world's largest elevator is in the Jio World Centre in Mumbai, India, and it can carry 235 people.
So, if that new building for the stadium breaks all the records, here's how it maths out:
46,000 fans / 235 people per elevator trip / 100 elevators * 30 seconds per trip = 1 minute
So, if the Saudis break all the records, and all the fans efficiently exit (no loading time), they could get everyone out in 1 minute.
Now let's do the math for something more realistic:
Assumptions:
- 75 elevators (about how many are in the Empire State Building)
- Elevator speed of 6 m/s (a typical speed for that height of building), for a round-trip time of 2 minutes
- Loading time of 10 seconds at the top floor, unloading time of 10 seconds at the ground floor
- Twenty-five people per trip (a typical "large" elevator)
46,000 fans / 25 people per elevator trip / 75 elevators * 2.3 minutes per trip =
56 minutes
Not as bad as I thought, but I didn't realize the scale of large buildings' elevator capacities, either...
