Why people can't ride in a VRC (Vertical Reciprocating Conveyor)
Why can't someone hop in a VRC (Vertical Reciprocating Conveyor) if it's strong enough to lift a couple of hundred kilos of steel?
It's not built or certified for that job. It's certified as a Conveyor, not an elevator, and those two things have completely different safety guidelines.
A passenger-rated lift needs features like redundant braking systems, so if one fails, there's a backup to catch you, not the floor. It needs door interlocks that physically prevent the lift from moving unless everything's sealed shut. Speed governors. Emergency rescue protocols if someone gets stuck between floors. Fall-arrest engineering is baked into the structure itself.
A VRC has none of that, because it was never designed to. It's built to move a pallet from floor one to floor two, safely and repeatedly, at a fraction of the cost, and it hits that bar without needing any of the passenger-safety engineering, because nobody's supposed to be standing on the platform when it moves.
That's actually where a lot of the cost gap comes from, too, if you think about it. All that extra engineering for human safety isn't optional once people are involved; it's mandatory, it's expensive, and it's inspected constantly. Skip the "people ride in it" requirement, and you skip that entire layer of design and compliance.
So it's not that a VRC couldn't physically hold a person's weight. It wasn't engineered, tested, or certified to protect one, and using it that way would be a safety violation, not a shortcut.