In order to improve the performance of the traction permanent magnet motor drives without weight transducer for direct-drive elevator applications during starting operation, this article proposes a novel control method based on the high-gain nonlinear active disturbance rejection control (HNLADRC) strategy. First, the limitation of linear and nonlinear error decay function of active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) method is analyzed, which is not suitable for the complex situation at starting operation of the traction motor. A high-gain nonlinear error decay function based ADRC method is proposed, which can achieve better performance in the starting operation of the traction motor. Both the high-gain extended state observer (HNLESO) and the high-gain nonlinear error feedback law (HNLEFL) are constructed by the high-gain error decay function to improve the compensation accuracy of the starting torque and the dynamics of the speed loop. By analyzing the error decay performance of the HNLESO and the HNLEFL, it is proved that the HNLADRC method has a faster error decay rate. Experimental results show that the proposed method can obtain a shorter rollback distance and faster response capability.