By David W. Dunlap | The New York Times

Add one more ear-popping superlative to the structural distinctions at 1 World Trade Center.

On opening in 2013, it will have the five fastest elevators in the Western Hemisphere, according to the company that will make them. These express cars, serving the restaurant and observatory, will reach a top speed of 2,000 feet a minute, meaning that a trip to the top of the city’s tallest building will take less than three-quarters of a minute.

To put that speed in perspective, it is 25 percent faster than the express elevators that served the twin towers – which seemed plenty quick enough, once you had negotiated the long waiting line.

The announcement was made by the ThyssenKrupp Elevator Corporation, which holds an $87.98 million contract from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for elevator and escalator service at 1 World Trade Center (also known as the Freedom Tower).

“These will actually be the fastest elevators in all the Americas,” Mark Schroeder, the company’s director of new construction sales, said in a statement. “There are only a handful of elevators in the world that go this fast.”

Taipei 101 in Taiwan, currently the tallest completed building in the world, is believed to have the fastest elevators, traveling at 3,314 feet a minute.

What will be missing in the new elevators at the World Trade Center is the shake, rattle and roll that visitors may remember from the express cars of the original World Trade Center.

“They’re going to be awesome,” said Steve Kinnaman, the lead consultant to the engineering firm Jaros Baum & Bolles, which is overseeing the development of vertical transportation at 1 World Trade Center. He based that assessment in part on firsthand experience in ThyssenKrupp elevators at the supertall Shanghai World Financial Center.

“The 2,000-feet-a-minute elevators we rode in Shanghai were not quite – but pretty close to – motionless,” Mr. Kinnaman said.

He credited advances in several areas, including improved alignment of the guiderails along which elevator cars travel and computerized roller guides that can compensate for what few bumps there are in the guiderails by exerting force in the opposite direction.

Mr. Kinnaman likened the function to a driver who knows from experience that there is a large pothole on the right-hand side of the road and avoids it by turning slightly to the left.

The original speed specification in the elevator contract called for 1,800-feet-a-minute service. But the Port Authority increased that. “The reason that the elevator speeds were increased to 2,000 feet per minute is to maximize the number of tourists and others who want to access the 1 World Trade Center observation deck,” said Steven Coleman, a spokesman for the authority.

The express elevators will travel a height of 1,293 feet, ThyssenKrupp said. Their capacity will be 4,000 pounds. There will be 66 other elevators in the building, 20 of which will run at 1,800 feet a minute.

In the Woolworth Building, the tallest in the world at the time of its completion in 1913, two cars ran at 700 feet a minute. A generation later, some of the elevators at the Empire State Building could travel at 1,200 feet a minute. At the original trade center, express cars rattled upward at 1,600 feet a minute.

There is no legal speed limit, said Edward A. Donoghue, the managing director and spokesman for the National Elevator Industry Inc., a trade organization. Instead, standards set by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers contain safety and engineering provisions appropriate to given speeds.

As for ear-popping, Mr. Schroeder of ThyssenKrupp said, “We do not anticipate this to be an issue.”