Do elevator upgrades increase your passive credit earnings, too?

When you upgrade your Death Star elevator the speed increases, and the tips go up by a predetermined factor.

But, does this also increase the passive traffic to your levels? In other words, does it increase the number of bitizens you do not ferry in the elevator that make sales on your levels?

I noticed that the descriptions include a PPM rating, but it's not clear what this means. I assume it's People Per Minute, but I don't know.

Solution 1:

Increasing PPM would have to lead to a higher passive credit earnings, as long as shops have stock to sale. The more people randomly delivered throughout the Tiny Death Star, the more people who buy items from shops.

How can we determine that PPM applies to passive credit earnings and not player activity? As there is no way that the level 2 elevator, the NB200 Commercial Lift, the first available upgrade for the elevator in Tiny Death Star, is generating 8 people per minute for the player to deliver. This rate means that the player would be present with a stream of bitizens spaced every 7.5 seconds after the delivery of the last bitizen.

Examining the second elevator upgrade, the Insta-Lift 2000 SE, we can see it has a 12 PPM rating. This means a bitizen would have to be popping up every 5 seconds in the lift to be escorted to a level by the player. So we can conclude that if the information posted in Tiny Death Star has any in-game meaning, then it must apply to the background bitizens that are arriving on the floors.

For further information, we can look at the Tiny Tower Wiki about elevators here: http://tinytowerwiki.com/Elevators
It notes that PPM = Passengers Per Minute, the rate that people are delivered. Since this rate is much too quick for passengers to be delivered by the player, it must apply to passive delivery (bitizens being delivered by the elevator "in the background").

Solution 2:

PPM, for the purposes of this answer, refers to the actual number of customers each level has per minute.

I've confirmed through testing that the middle two elevators, the Insta-Lift 2000 SE and the Ultra-Lift 3000 Extreme both offer 10PPM when the game is closed, and about 5PPM while you are playing the game. The 'better' elevator does not actually increase customers or profit, "passive" earnings, at all.

I don't know the actual PPM of the NB200 Commercial Lift, and I'm not planning on upgrading to the Infini-Lift Lightspeed until someone else indicates that it actually does increase the real PPM.

As far as I can tell, the only benefit to upgrading the elevators is that they go faster if you are ferrying people to the floors yourself.