Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I read once that when elevators still had operators, larger buildings would have one or more dispatch agents in the lobby that would line people up at the appropriate elevator for the range of floors they intended to visit.
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…
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).