Facilitation | Elevators a hassle

I will summarize this text for you readers right away: Lagunen Storsenter has a serious problem, it is costing them visitors and paying customers.

I am of course talking about the lifts to the shopping centre. Before its most recent (completed) expansion, Lagunen had three elevators that brought customers and visitors to two floors. Lagunen now has four floors, and it was expanded with two (!) lifts. There are therefore only two lifts that take you from the first to the fourth floor. Fem takes you the shortest distance, from the first floor to the second floor. In addition, there are conveyor belts between all floors, but I, as a wheelchair user, cannot use them.

How this has been able to pass controls is completely incomprehensible to me. It is obvious to the vast majority of people that when a center becomes considerably larger, that more people will use the lifts – so it does not make sense to expand with fewer lifts than you had before.

I am a wheelchair user, I have experienced queuing to wait for the lift for ten minutes. I am not allowed to use the wheelchairs, even though my wheelchair has electric brakes. It is also not without problems to use the treadmills for the elderly with a walker.

Now I’m tired of this problem, and my biggest frustration is that Lagunen Storsenter can do very little to fix the problem, a problem created by an absolutely terrible planning of its previous development.

Recently I was at Lagunen, I was going to visit several shops on the second and fourth floors. I travel to and from the center by light rail, so I arrive at the center on what is the third floor. After I have arrived at the section where the lift is located, I see that there is a different person than me who will be using the lift, an elderly woman going down. I’ve decided that I’ll do away with the fourth floor, so that I don’t have anything I strictly need for the rest of the center tour, so I’m going up.

We are waiting.

The elevator going down arrives. I inform the elderly woman who is waiting with me that her lift has arrived, and she tries as hard as she can to catch the lift, but right in front of her nose the doors of the lift close. It was about to pinch the wheel of her walker, but the doors closed anyway, and the lift disappeared without her getting in.

She turns to me to say, “I’m not fast enough for these elevators, me.”

I felt myself getting frustrated, not only do the lifts take an inconceivably long time for those of us who actually have to use them, but when they first arrive, isn’t it certain that you can catch them once?

Another person has arrived, she is going up – like me. My lift arrives, I head towards the lift, but a moment’s hesitation on the part of me and the new person causes the lift to also leave us on the third floor, even though the man standing in the lift eventually tries to open the doors again.

That was the last straw for me. I left from there. Nesttun Senter has shops that meet my needs that day.

Since Nesttun also has a Coop shop, it will be at Nesttun that I will do my action from now on. Going to Nesttun to have an easier shopping experience is also a tip I give to people in a similar situation.

If it had only been possible to use the roller conveyors, this would not have been a big problem for me – but the entirety of this problem is so unimaginably boring, sad and frustrating that I really can’t understand how people in my situation (or similar) cope to use the Lagunen Storsenter to get rid of the day’s trip outside the house, a fun shopping round, or everyday shopping.

I really can’t agree that Lagunen is suitable for that anymore.