Sky Pendula

Traveling laterally in a city isn't any fun. You generally need to take an elevator to ground level, wait through lights and traffic to cross the street a few times, then take another elevator back up. There are currently skyways between some buildings to ease this pain, but these are generally limited to buildings that are very close together for structural reasons.

A sky pendulum would be a box similar to a glass elevator, except mounted on a pole many stories above the ground. The base of the pole is mounted at the center of a street or park, and consists of springs and linear motors or magnets. At the point of contact between the sky pendulum and a building is a large spring or soft material to deaden any impact from lateral forces not taken care of at the pole's base.

Sky pendula operate very much like an elevator, in that you walk in and press a button. How it differs from an elevator is that the button starts the motor/magnet at the base of the pole, which swings the sky pendulum to an adjacent building.

I picture having these installed throughout a city. Simple systems would have, say, 8th floor lobbies with shopping that you walk past on your way through a building. More complex systems would remove elevators all together and include telescoping pendula.

(Pendula used as a plurl of pendulum in an act of grammatical protest.)