I'd guess that Heinlein was aware of it and scaled it up in his imagination.
The Roads must roll — they are the arteries of the nation. When they stop, everything stops. Factories idle, food rots, men starve. The nation cannot live without its Roads.
A thousand feet wide, level as a floor, strip after strip moving past in ordered procession. The slow strips on the outside moved at five miles an hour; the inner ones faster and faster, until the express strip in the center rushed past at a hundred miles an hour.
-- The Roads Must Roll, Astounding Science Fiction, June 1940.
Wow, this is exactly the staggered-speed walkway system I once saw in a Philip K. Dick short story, forget which, but obviously it was written after this.
I read this as a teenager in a Sci-Fi compilation without paying much attention to the author, so I forgot where I read it or who wrote it or where I could find it again. But I composed and tape-recorded a melody to the lyrics which still hums in my head :
While you ride
While you glide
We are watching down inside
that your roadways go rolling along. ...
Also Arthur C Clarke in The City and the Stars (1956):
“An engineer of the ancient world would have gone slowly mad trying to understand how an apparently solid roadway could be fixed at the sides while toward the centre it moved at a steadily increasing velocity.”
The things I took away from reading Niven was transfer booths. The world has homogenized because information and people were transmitted instantly one from corner of the globe to another.
I loved the conservation of momentum "hack" for those teleportation booths. Go on, everyone who hasn't read it, see if you can guess how he dealt with that.
so assuming inner sidewalk moving at 100 mph, next outer at 95, and each moving at 5 per less, when big muscular terrorists placed on s-100 carrying a big cardboard box filled with nails and throw it as quickly and hard as possible so that the box of nails open up over s-75 at what velocity are the nails raining down on pedestrians on s-75?
Oddly I’m pretty sure a strong guy throwing a rock really hard at someone without the walkways would do way more damage. Nails at those speeds just aren’t that dangerous because their momentum is so low and they aren’t particularly sharp.
Assuming that these terrorists are relatively fast runners, being in good shape, and they decide to exit the walkways on the other side, how far on the other side will they be in relation to the nail rain on s-75 they caused.
Everybody carries a gun in Heinlein stories, so those terrorists will be quickly dealt with by armed citizens, thus confirming the superiority of Libertarianism.
In 1940 Heinlein was a 32 year old committed New Deal Democrat and a supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt. When he wrote this story he was an active progressive who had recently worked on Upton Sinclair’s socialist “End Poverty in California” campaign.
It was a recurring theme throughout most of Golden Age fiction.
E.g. Clifford D. Simak mentions them as a mode of transportation in The Goblin Reservation, Asimov has them in Robots of Dawn, and I'm sure I'm forgetting plenty more.
It could be that it was Heinlein who kicked of the trend.
People have tried faster moving walkways many times. The problem is getting humans on and off such a system safely in a way that is easy to maintain.
In practice, everyday transportation systems need to accommodate a wide variety of users safely, like a toddler, or a commuter holding a cup of coffee, or a grandmother with a walker.
> People have tried faster moving walkways many times. The problem is getting humans on and off such a system safely in a way that is easy to maintain.
Right. You can build it, but not make it ADA-compliant. One subway station in France tried a 4km/h moving sidewalk, but the accident rate was too high.
The Paris system was really two trains on parallel tracks. Here's the mechanism.[1] Same concept as buses and trains where there are turntable sections between the cars. Powered by motors on the tracks. Possibly the first application of distributed power, with many motors pulling together in a controlled way.
Disney's PeopleMover, also powered by track motors and friction, can be thought of as a descendant. Disney had elaborate plans for little cars on tracks for EPCOT, but that never worked out.
I took it many times, it didn't feel particularly dangerous but you had to pay more attention than on a regular moving walkway. What ultimately killed it was reliability, availability was too low. With more deployed I guess the kinks would have slowly disappeared, but the market just doesn't seem to be there.
Pearson airport in Toronto has ones that accelerate up to a fast speed. People who can’t use them can either walk beside them or hire a small electric golf cart. There is no reason to ban them just because a small portion of the population can’t use them.
it is worth noting that we have transportation systems where you get into a slow moving vehicle that then speeds up. the cable car is a lot safer than a faster moving sidewalk because you can just get inside and sit down securely.
of course, it takes up a lot more space and costs a lot more money.
And you can only hop on/hop off a cable car at predetermined locations. To keep average speed high, those tend to be spaced relatively far apart.
I’m not sure about the “takes a lot more space”, and I definitely doubt about the “costs a lot more money”. Using outdoor escalators as proxies, I suspect outdoor moving sidewalks will need lots and lots of maintenance. If you want to have some guarantee of service you’ll also need multiple sidewalks side-by-side.
That's been tried. Never Stop Railway, 1924.[1] The drive system is a variable pitch screw between the rails. Large screw pitch between stations for fast travel, much tighter pitch in stations for very slow movement along the platform.
Never tried again with that kind of drive, although there are park rides where the loading platform moves. This requires safety devices and staff to prevent people jams at the end of the platform.
They are pretty common tourist transports in mountainous areas and ski resorts. They're even being used for regular public transport now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdTE4TCqkZo
In Hong Kong, public outdoor escalators like the Central–Mid-Levels Escalator are a big part of public transport. They go one way - down from 6am-10am, otherwise up. They’ve regenerated/gentrified a whole area of town that was previously hard to get to. Few cars = people travel differently.
It reminded me of those Asimov worlds where everything moves by machine and nobody really walks anymore. It sounds futuristic, but also a bit depressing. Sure, it’s more efficient but life feels flatter somehow.
I love the kid who is hamming it up at the bottom of the frame. I've been a photographer/videographer for my entire professional career and have run into this kid many, many times. Adults exhibit this behavior too but it is usually much more moderated.
This kid had to know what a camera was, which end was filming (some early film cameras appeared to be simple boxes), and wanted to make his mark on the final product.
It’s crazy to me watching this and thinking that if that kid lived to 100 he would’ve died 30+ years ago. That unknown child will be forever captured on this film.
Every time I watch old films with children in them I always think about how they’ve been dead, hopefully of old age, for a long time already.
> Every time I watch old films with children in them I always think about how they’ve been dead, hopefully of old age, for a long time already.
I've got movies (black & white, no audio) recorded on a "Pathe-Baby" camera [1] from my grand-mother and her sister, my great-aunt, in the early 1920s, where they're both little girls playing.
I knew them both very well, they lived through WWII in Europe and they both died old. My great-aunt lived until her 100th year.
Very few things are as moving as this little, short Pathe Baby vids I've got of them.
A few years ago we asked a little local shop to convert these to digital format and these files are precious treasure in the family.
I like that the fence moves with it. It seems like more of a complete vision than the moving sidewalks we have today, which always look like they were just dropped into a hallway.
We also seem to be unable to perfectly match food and hand speed these days. I’m not sure if this is a “feature” somehow, but it bothers me a lot. They didn’t seem to have this issue with the floor and fence, as far as I could tell.
That’s because the systems are designed to be dropped into a hallway. In modern moving walkways and escalators, the treads and handrail belt return on the underside.
The system used in Paris requires a giant bulb shape to turn around the fence, which is generally a lot harder and more expensive to accommodate.
I believe it's to allow room for the handrail belt to wear down, which brings its speed closer to the stairs until it starts de-syncing in the opposite direction. If it started perfectly, you'd have to replace the belt more frequently to maintain the same level of tolerance.
According to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZ8ehplVFp4&t=636 the handrail is driven by a friction wheel that wears out over time, so its diameter gradually decreases and the handrail speed slows down (until it gets too out of sync, and the friction wheel is replaced).
Because you'd have teeth rubbing out all through the course, which would eat them through very quickly, or you'd have to add toothed rollers throughout the course which would increase complexity tremendously.
Modern urban car infrastructure is neither space- nor energy-efficient, but urban planning is long-term, and decisions shift all efficiency considerations in the long-term in a way that's hard to undo.
For example, transportation of people with the modern extensive net of streets would be most convenient and efficient if there was some kind of public transportation in small buses, available on demand and price being determined by regular market mechanisms. The difference between what I imagine and things like Uber would be a strong integration with existing train and bus lines, and public funding and legislation. Maybe self-driving will get us there, but there are also many political hurdles that make the less efficient option (high coefficient of cars pp) more attractive than the alternative that could provide better efficiency (and, ideally, also great user experience).
On demand is bad! People have places to be and they need to be able to depend on arriving on time. on demand means they can't be sure when the transport will detour to pick someone else up thus making them late. what we need are reliable fixed routes that are predictable.
making on denand reliable means that there are more vehicles driving around than we now have cars - as empty vehicles reposition just in case someone else wants to go someplace right after you.
I would not deny this, and I don't judge people for enjoying to drive. It doesn't prevent me from thinking about alternative worlds / cities though, or in this case, just a stronger focus on establishing public car-based transportation (such as buses), in addition to train lines, which take very long to be built or are currently lacking space to be built altogether, where they would be most needed.
There is absolutely nothing less pleasing than sitting in traffic in a major North American city with aggressive drivers all around you constantly breaking laws because they think they are more important than everyone else.
In contrast European trains are down right relaxing.
That is stupid. people have places to be. Only a tiny minority are on transit for fun. Everyone else just wants to be there. you do these people a massive disservice by not making their ride efficient.
and the minority who are for the ride will figure out how to make it work.
Even with a job I'd rather spend an hour on a train than 35 minutes in LA traffic. (30 minutes... I guess I'd prefer the stress + a little more time for breakfast. But I'd put a 2x multiplier on not having to drive myself)
Your goal is still being there though, not riding the train. After a few trips you have seen the scenery out the window and just want the trip over with (though maybe you can enjoy the book you are reading most days or whatever you are doing and call it relaxation)
Reading a book is being productive. You can also write, work, or nap. In contrast driving is the biggest waste of time in a persons life. I feel so strongly about this that I’d accept a vastly smaller house just to minimize time travelling. Second best to that is not driving so that I can make use of my time.
I'm not sure. I want to see public transport in a city done with rollercoasters. The amount using it for fun would go up dramatically. It would change overnight from just another utterly boring city not worth visiting into a tourist hot spot. Similarly, people who need to be places will make it work.
Life is about the journey. All those roads and other boring means of transportation are just places no one wants to be.
I love this. As another poster brought up, plenty of people buy enjoyable cars and motorcycles for the pleasure of driving. Why not add a little spice to life?
Spice is fine - but you still need to get places and that is the primary goal of most cars. People who have the car/motorcycle for fun only nearly all have some other vehicle they use as the "daily driver" to get places. I might take a train on a sunday drive myself once in a while.
The majority of uses should be for people trying to get someplace. If the trip is also fun that is a bonus, but if it is only fun but otherwise worthless (that is something else is enough better) your system won't get many riders.
That is great for the first week or two, and then it is common place and you just want to be there. It will be old faster if you happen to ride at the same time as someone who gets motion sickness. (or worse if you are the person with motion sickness)
I think citymapper tried to execu this as a pivot. They had an idea to do it in London and other countries and did trial it for a while. Not sure why it (presumably) failed.
I'd note that startup money of the is much harder to get in London, so a US startup might be able to force the idea from experiment to profitability.
This doesn't work in cities. The vast majority of peoples movement are not immediately necessary. They can wait 10-15 minutes (or plan ahead) for efficiency. This also cuts down on costs for everyone.
On demand is bad but not for that reason. people have places to be and are bad at planning. You should be running every 5 minutes so even if they are running late it still isn't very long until you get there.
every 10-15 minutes is cheaper and so because of cost you are often forced to be this bad (or worse) just to be affordable, but it isn't what anyone wants and people who use such systems will dream of ways to make a car work where they are
I wear a hat outside. It makes walking in the Seattle rain quite pleasant, as my glasses don't fog up and the water doesn't go down the back of my neck. When sunny, I don't need to apply sunscreen, and the glare from the top of my head does not cause car crashes.
As a bonus, I can imagine myself as Clint Eastwood.
People were spending much more time outside and the roads were much more dusty. You need a hat to keep yourself from the sun and the dust. Cars made them obsolete.
At around 1.10 in the video something curious happens: a grown up "passenger"throws a young boy who tries to enter the sidewalk off it. What is going on? Were people more rude in those days?
used to go between levels so a flat escalator, can take trolleys or there is a trolley chain haul beside. Bunnings (Hammerbarn if you must) have them. Giant tilt slab constructed category killers. Where sprawl is permitted they're a one layer building but in space constrained areas they have two or three (carpark under a 2 layer building) and these walkways exist to get your inflatable shark, chainsaw and bucket of chips down or up, depending.
In the 1900s every city was walkable. Most cities had trains of some sort for the majority of transport and bikes or horses for the last mile.
It really makes me sad to see even old cartoons showing off the tram systems of the day. Those all got pulled up for "progress" thrusting us all backwards into bumper to bumper traffic.
Whats incredible is that happened almost immediately after expansion of personal vehicles.
> Walkable cities are too small to have the wealth of options a car (or transit) city does.
It's counter intuitive but it's quiet the opposite. I've lived in the UK for a while and in some pretty walkable cities. Even in the smaller cities, what you'd find is a wealth of different shops and options catering to all sorts of needs.
But then just consider that when you are walking you are being exposed to all the shops in the city.
Cars isolate. You are much less likely to notice the hole in the wall specialty shop and you are much more likely to instead just go to a Walmart or national brand place to get what you want. And you'll much more likely want to stop at all in one stores such as Walmart because you don't want to hop in your car multiple times to get the shopping done. In walkable cities, it's almost like a mall experience in every city center. 3 doors down is the hardware store and 2 more stores is the candy shop.
And because that downtown location is a highly desirable place with lots of foot traffic, any shop that goes out of business gets quickly replaced with another. Which means you generally end up with a lot of pretty high quality stores.
That depends on what you are looking for. There are plenty of shops for the common needs - but if you want an odd niche no small walkable area can support it. How many magic stories can your city support? Even something like a guitar shop need a very dense area for people who live in walking distance to be enough to support it. I can think of dozens of other niches - many smaller the above examples.
> but if you want an odd niche no small walkable area can support it.
You'd be really surprised. I knew smaller cities with shops dedicated to Warhammer 40k. [1] (Surprisingly, still in business :) )
> Even something like a guitar shop need a very dense area for people who live in walking distance to be enough to support it.
A guitar shop just needs enough people interested in guitars. Being walkable doesn't mean there's no transit. Usually, walkable cities will have a city center where the shops are concentrated and if the city is big enough, you'll end up with a bus station in the city center. In fact, the referenced city has several of those shops. [2]
This isn't a large city, it's around 100,000. It's also fairly isolated. Nobody is coming to this city to get a guitar.
Being walkable doesn't preclude having transit though. It does clash with cars because cars need parking, and parking takes so much space that walking distances quickly become an issue. But subways, trams or even buses don't have that issue, they don't meaningfully decrease walkability
European cities are also quite car-infected, but in many the older core still work somewhat similar to how cities worked back then: you have the daily necessities within a 10 minute walk, for anything else you can fetch transit to the city center within 15 minutes, where you generally get everything else (except Ikea)
Romanticizing horses, specifically, is a very rose colored glasses situation. At the turn of the last century, cities were getting overwhelmed by thousands of tons of horse feces, a similar volume of their urine, and the carcasses of overworked horses dropping dead in the street.
> Romanticizing horses, specifically, is a very rose colored glasses situation.
Apologies, I wasn't trying to romanticize the horse aspect. Rather, the public transit and train shipping aspect.
In the US, at one point trains were so popular that even rural farms would have small train depots to load up crops on and ultimately ship goods wherever they need to be. You'd even find stores with train station docking.
In fact, before the national highway system, pretty much the only way to travel was by train.
We've taken a costly step backwards by building out the highway system and moving to semi shipping rather than keeping and expanding public transit.
> In the 1900s every city was walkable. Most cities had trains of some sort for the majority of transport and bikes or horses for the last mile.
Not the "last mile". The _only_ mile. Cities were so walkable that London had multiple distinct local accents because people were living their entire lives in one neighborhood, venturing outside only for special occasions.
This changed only with the invention of electric trams that allowed people to relatively cheaply move around. Technically, horse-driven trams were invented a bit earlier but they never got built at scale.
He was a child and probably of a lower (aspirational) class that the guy who slapped him. Children and working-class people having rights is a surprisingly recent concept.
Someone else in these comments said s/he wonders what lives the people ended up living who were seen in old photos/videos. Your comment makes me wonder what life this boy (well, he's our senior) lived, and what his impact is beyond being a participant of a curious event in a YouTube video. I guess he had a paper trail, relatives, etc, but there's probably no way to identify him from the present (except if someone's grand-grandkid can give us an anecdote about his grand-grandfather seeing a kid being shoved at the moving walkways in Paris..
> It’s fair to say that few of us now marvel at moving walkways, those standard infrastructural elements of such utilitarian spaces as airport terminals, subway stations, and big-box stores.
You've gotta be referring to escalators here. Never seen a moving walkway in a big-box store, or a subway station for that matter.
That one was in activity about the same period I took the Montparnasse station somewhat regularly, and over those years I couldn't ever take it as it was always either broken or running opposite to my direction.
I do think a concept with parallel tracks moving at different speeds would have been easier to use and more reliable though. But it might not have been revolutionary/over-engineered enough to attract attention and subsidies.
Man, they should've designed it similarly to the video, with parallel tracks with differing speeds. But people's lack of attention would probably lead them to park a foot on each track and causing a tumble.
Speaking of speed, in the Stockholm main station the escalators go faster than others I've experienced... But I don't know if they've adjusted the speed since my experience years ago.
> You've gotta be referring to escalators here. Never seen a moving walkway in a big-box store
I have seen some occasionally in stores, in or around Paris. They usually are on an incline to allow trolleys to be taken up or down a level. Or similarly outside malls to get trolleys to the upper level of a car park. That’s in places where you have to stack car parks instead of just having them sprawl all over the place, of course.
> or a subway station for that matter.
There are a few of them in Paris métro stations. Some of them in the London Underground, as well.
I'd guess that Heinlein was aware of it and scaled it up in his imagination.
https://ia601208.us.archive.org/32/items/calibre_library_178...This somehow feels like the horizontal equivalent of a Pater Noster elevator. But probably with even worse error modes if it stops working at 100mph.
Asimov went into some detail with this premise too, in Caves of Steel iirc. I suppose he probably got it from Heinlein.
Vance also had a novel with mechanical roads. I guess that was a common trope back when the first mechanical stairs appeared.
Wow, this is exactly the staggered-speed walkway system I once saw in a Philip K. Dick short story, forget which, but obviously it was written after this.
I read this as a teenager in a Sci-Fi compilation without paying much attention to the author, so I forgot where I read it or who wrote it or where I could find it again. But I composed and tape-recorded a melody to the lyrics which still hums in my head :
Thanks for posting.Also Arthur C Clarke in The City and the Stars (1956):
“An engineer of the ancient world would have gone slowly mad trying to understand how an apparently solid roadway could be fixed at the sides while toward the centre it moved at a steadily increasing velocity.”
I think about this every time I get on a moving walkway and wish it had a few more speeds.
I think about:
https://m.soundcloud.com/thomas-dolby-official/pedestrian-wa...
Yeah, love that idea of progressive velocities. I ant someone to at least build a short test track like this so we can play with it.
Seem to recall they were called "slidewalks" by some Sci-Fi author—probably Heinlein, eh?
Larry Niven called them slidewalks and I've always been sorry this terminology never caught on.
In the UK, Singapore and maybe other countries with British influence, they use the word travelator, which I find quite cool as well.
The things I took away from reading Niven was transfer booths. The world has homogenized because information and people were transmitted instantly one from corner of the globe to another.
Ooohhh boy.
If you want to see this idea taken to the next level, you should read Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos. ;)
I loved the conservation of momentum "hack" for those teleportation booths. Go on, everyone who hasn't read it, see if you can guess how he dealt with that.
so assuming inner sidewalk moving at 100 mph, next outer at 95, and each moving at 5 per less, when big muscular terrorists placed on s-100 carrying a big cardboard box filled with nails and throw it as quickly and hard as possible so that the box of nails open up over s-75 at what velocity are the nails raining down on pedestrians on s-75?
Pedestrians would likely not be hit, because few would want to walk there with a 75mph headwind in the first place.
Oddly I’m pretty sure a strong guy throwing a rock really hard at someone without the walkways would do way more damage. Nails at those speeds just aren’t that dangerous because their momentum is so low and they aren’t particularly sharp.
Compared to doing that from a moving car?
Assuming that these terrorists are relatively fast runners, being in good shape, and they decide to exit the walkways on the other side, how far on the other side will they be in relation to the nail rain on s-75 they caused.
Two planes are headed towards new york. The first is descending into the city at 805 miles per hour. The second 846 miles per…
given these facts that I have already laid out, which terrorist has the blue handlebar mustache?
what color was the bike the ape was riding, when the terrorist with the blue handlebar threw his nails?
The North Pole.
Everybody carries a gun in Heinlein stories, so those terrorists will be quickly dealt with by armed citizens, thus confirming the superiority of Libertarianism.
In 1940 Heinlein was a 32 year old committed New Deal Democrat and a supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt. When he wrote this story he was an active progressive who had recently worked on Upton Sinclair’s socialist “End Poverty in California” campaign.
It was a recurring theme throughout most of Golden Age fiction.
E.g. Clifford D. Simak mentions them as a mode of transportation in The Goblin Reservation, Asimov has them in Robots of Dawn, and I'm sure I'm forgetting plenty more.
It could be that it was Heinlein who kicked of the trend.
People have tried faster moving walkways many times. The problem is getting humans on and off such a system safely in a way that is easy to maintain.
In practice, everyday transportation systems need to accommodate a wide variety of users safely, like a toddler, or a commuter holding a cup of coffee, or a grandmother with a walker.
> People have tried faster moving walkways many times. The problem is getting humans on and off such a system safely in a way that is easy to maintain.
Right. You can build it, but not make it ADA-compliant. One subway station in France tried a 4km/h moving sidewalk, but the accident rate was too high.
The Paris system was really two trains on parallel tracks. Here's the mechanism.[1] Same concept as buses and trains where there are turntable sections between the cars. Powered by motors on the tracks. Possibly the first application of distributed power, with many motors pulling together in a controlled way.
Disney's PeopleMover, also powered by track motors and friction, can be thought of as a descendant. Disney had elaborate plans for little cars on tracks for EPCOT, but that never worked out.
[1] https://www.worldfairs.info/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=125-l...
The too-fast one in Paris was 12km/h, not 4km/h which would be OK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_walkway#Trottoir_roulan...
I took it many times, it didn't feel particularly dangerous but you had to pay more attention than on a regular moving walkway. What ultimately killed it was reliability, availability was too low. With more deployed I guess the kinks would have slowly disappeared, but the market just doesn't seem to be there.
Pearson airport in Toronto has ones that accelerate up to a fast speed. People who can’t use them can either walk beside them or hire a small electric golf cart. There is no reason to ban them just because a small portion of the population can’t use them.
it is worth noting that we have transportation systems where you get into a slow moving vehicle that then speeds up. the cable car is a lot safer than a faster moving sidewalk because you can just get inside and sit down securely.
of course, it takes up a lot more space and costs a lot more money.
And you can only hop on/hop off a cable car at predetermined locations. To keep average speed high, those tend to be spaced relatively far apart.
I’m not sure about the “takes a lot more space”, and I definitely doubt about the “costs a lot more money”. Using outdoor escalators as proxies, I suspect outdoor moving sidewalks will need lots and lots of maintenance. If you want to have some guarantee of service you’ll also need multiple sidewalks side-by-side.
That's been tried. Never Stop Railway, 1924.[1] The drive system is a variable pitch screw between the rails. Large screw pitch between stations for fast travel, much tighter pitch in stations for very slow movement along the platform.
Never tried again with that kind of drive, although there are park rides where the loading platform moves. This requires safety devices and staff to prevent people jams at the end of the platform.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EX_MlWL7YKM
I'm talking about aerial cable cars, which are plenty in use around the world today. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/X5qjnryYWQY
They are pretty common tourist transports in mountainous areas and ski resorts. They're even being used for regular public transport now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdTE4TCqkZo
That link is fantastic, thanks!
I believe it was H.G. Wells, in his A Story of the Days to Come (1897) and When the Sleeper Wakes (1899).
In Hong Kong, public outdoor escalators like the Central–Mid-Levels Escalator are a big part of public transport. They go one way - down from 6am-10am, otherwise up. They’ve regenerated/gentrified a whole area of town that was previously hard to get to. Few cars = people travel differently.
It reminded me of those Asimov worlds where everything moves by machine and nobody really walks anymore. It sounds futuristic, but also a bit depressing. Sure, it’s more efficient but life feels flatter somehow.
I love the kid who is hamming it up at the bottom of the frame. I've been a photographer/videographer for my entire professional career and have run into this kid many, many times. Adults exhibit this behavior too but it is usually much more moderated.
This kid had to know what a camera was, which end was filming (some early film cameras appeared to be simple boxes), and wanted to make his mark on the final product.
It’s crazy to me watching this and thinking that if that kid lived to 100 he would’ve died 30+ years ago. That unknown child will be forever captured on this film.
Every time I watch old films with children in them I always think about how they’ve been dead, hopefully of old age, for a long time already.
> Every time I watch old films with children in them I always think about how they’ve been dead, hopefully of old age, for a long time already.
I've got movies (black & white, no audio) recorded on a "Pathe-Baby" camera [1] from my grand-mother and her sister, my great-aunt, in the early 1920s, where they're both little girls playing.
I knew them both very well, they lived through WWII in Europe and they both died old. My great-aunt lived until her 100th year.
Very few things are as moving as this little, short Pathe Baby vids I've got of them.
A few years ago we asked a little local shop to convert these to digital format and these files are precious treasure in the family.
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path%C3%A9-Baby
Some guy smacks the kid with a light left hook at about 1:14.
There even appear to be two guys dressed in uniforms, chivvying kids off the roadway?
Wikipedia has a nice page about it : "Rue de l'Avenir" (Street of the future)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rue_de_l%27Avenir
Scroll down to the photos and be momentarily surprised at the fact that some are in colour.
Hand-colored, "photochromes". One of them is in Commons category "1900 black and white photographs". Check out "autochromes", though:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Autochromes
Leonid Andreev's moody selfie poses amuse me. (Circa 1910.)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Autochromes_by_L...
I like that the fence moves with it. It seems like more of a complete vision than the moving sidewalks we have today, which always look like they were just dropped into a hallway.
We also seem to be unable to perfectly match food and hand speed these days. I’m not sure if this is a “feature” somehow, but it bothers me a lot. They didn’t seem to have this issue with the floor and fence, as far as I could tell.
That’s because the systems are designed to be dropped into a hallway. In modern moving walkways and escalators, the treads and handrail belt return on the underside.
The system used in Paris requires a giant bulb shape to turn around the fence, which is generally a lot harder and more expensive to accommodate.
I believe it's to allow room for the handrail belt to wear down, which brings its speed closer to the stairs until it starts de-syncing in the opposite direction. If it started perfectly, you'd have to replace the belt more frequently to maintain the same level of tolerance.
If I’m understanding what you’re saying, couldn’t that be solved with some kind of belt tensioner?
According to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZ8ehplVFp4&t=636 the handrail is driven by a friction wheel that wears out over time, so its diameter gradually decreases and the handrail speed slows down (until it gets too out of sync, and the friction wheel is replaced).
I wonder why they can't just use a toothed belt.
Because you'd have teeth rubbing out all through the course, which would eat them through very quickly, or you'd have to add toothed rollers throughout the course which would increase complexity tremendously.
Modern urban car infrastructure is neither space- nor energy-efficient, but urban planning is long-term, and decisions shift all efficiency considerations in the long-term in a way that's hard to undo.
For example, transportation of people with the modern extensive net of streets would be most convenient and efficient if there was some kind of public transportation in small buses, available on demand and price being determined by regular market mechanisms. The difference between what I imagine and things like Uber would be a strong integration with existing train and bus lines, and public funding and legislation. Maybe self-driving will get us there, but there are also many political hurdles that make the less efficient option (high coefficient of cars pp) more attractive than the alternative that could provide better efficiency (and, ideally, also great user experience).
On demand is bad! People have places to be and they need to be able to depend on arriving on time. on demand means they can't be sure when the transport will detour to pick someone else up thus making them late. what we need are reliable fixed routes that are predictable.
making on denand reliable means that there are more vehicles driving around than we now have cars - as empty vehicles reposition just in case someone else wants to go someplace right after you.
Efficiency should not be pursued to the exclusion of everything else. As the article itself says:
transportation should be about more than just getting from A to B; it should be a pleasure as well
I would not deny this, and I don't judge people for enjoying to drive. It doesn't prevent me from thinking about alternative worlds / cities though, or in this case, just a stronger focus on establishing public car-based transportation (such as buses), in addition to train lines, which take very long to be built or are currently lacking space to be built altogether, where they would be most needed.
There is absolutely nothing less pleasing than sitting in traffic in a major North American city with aggressive drivers all around you constantly breaking laws because they think they are more important than everyone else.
In contrast European trains are down right relaxing.
That is stupid. people have places to be. Only a tiny minority are on transit for fun. Everyone else just wants to be there. you do these people a massive disservice by not making their ride efficient.
and the minority who are for the ride will figure out how to make it work.
Even with a job I'd rather spend an hour on a train than 35 minutes in LA traffic. (30 minutes... I guess I'd prefer the stress + a little more time for breakfast. But I'd put a 2x multiplier on not having to drive myself)
Your goal is still being there though, not riding the train. After a few trips you have seen the scenery out the window and just want the trip over with (though maybe you can enjoy the book you are reading most days or whatever you are doing and call it relaxation)
Reading a book is being productive. You can also write, work, or nap. In contrast driving is the biggest waste of time in a persons life. I feel so strongly about this that I’d accept a vastly smaller house just to minimize time travelling. Second best to that is not driving so that I can make use of my time.
I'm not sure. I want to see public transport in a city done with rollercoasters. The amount using it for fun would go up dramatically. It would change overnight from just another utterly boring city not worth visiting into a tourist hot spot. Similarly, people who need to be places will make it work.
Life is about the journey. All those roads and other boring means of transportation are just places no one wants to be.
Lawsuit city.
For many disabled people driving isn’t really possible. Now they have to hop on a rollercoaster ?
High speed rail would be more than enough for me. DC to NYC in 1 hour flat. Philly to NYC in 30 min.
Sacramento to SF in 1 hour, which would allow for normal people to buy homes and commute into town.
I love this. As another poster brought up, plenty of people buy enjoyable cars and motorcycles for the pleasure of driving. Why not add a little spice to life?
Spice is fine - but you still need to get places and that is the primary goal of most cars. People who have the car/motorcycle for fun only nearly all have some other vehicle they use as the "daily driver" to get places. I might take a train on a sunday drive myself once in a while.
The majority of uses should be for people trying to get someplace. If the trip is also fun that is a bonus, but if it is only fun but otherwise worthless (that is something else is enough better) your system won't get many riders.
That is great for the first week or two, and then it is common place and you just want to be there. It will be old faster if you happen to ride at the same time as someone who gets motion sickness. (or worse if you are the person with motion sickness)
I think citymapper tried to execu this as a pivot. They had an idea to do it in London and other countries and did trial it for a while. Not sure why it (presumably) failed.
I'd note that startup money of the is much harder to get in London, so a US startup might be able to force the idea from experiment to profitability.
> available on demand
This doesn't work in cities. The vast majority of peoples movement are not immediately necessary. They can wait 10-15 minutes (or plan ahead) for efficiency. This also cuts down on costs for everyone.
On demand is bad but not for that reason. people have places to be and are bad at planning. You should be running every 5 minutes so even if they are running late it still isn't very long until you get there.
every 10-15 minutes is cheaper and so because of cost you are often forced to be this bad (or worse) just to be affordable, but it isn't what anyone wants and people who use such systems will dream of ways to make a car work where they are
If you like this kind of stuff I highly recommend
Expo: Magic of the White City. the first 10 mins or so are a little corny but it gets better and is super fascinating
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cpOQE5KJJds
As usual, Edison didn't do it himself:
> Thomas Edison sent one of his producers, James Henry White, to the Exposition and Mr. White shot at least 16 movies
Filmed by James Henry White. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H._White
ZZ Top's name before it was ZZ Top was Moving Sidewalks
It’s amazing how ideas from over a century ago still feel futuristic today.
Somewhat off-topic, but why are all the men in the film wearing hats? Was this some sort of dress code?
Almost every man wore a hat until the 1960s. There's a bunch of weird culture about this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_Hat_Riot for instance
There's lots of pictures of the event if you search
I wear a hat outside. It makes walking in the Seattle rain quite pleasant, as my glasses don't fog up and the water doesn't go down the back of my neck. When sunny, I don't need to apply sunscreen, and the glare from the top of my head does not cause car crashes.
As a bonus, I can imagine myself as Clint Eastwood.
Was this some sort of dress code?
Yes
The last US president to wear a Lincoln-style stovepipe hat was ... JFK
People were spending much more time outside and the roads were much more dusty. You need a hat to keep yourself from the sun and the dust. Cars made them obsolete.
At around 1.10 in the video something curious happens: a grown up "passenger"throws a young boy who tries to enter the sidewalk off it. What is going on? Were people more rude in those days?
> moving walkways, those standard infrastructural elements of such utilitarian spaces as airport terminals, subway stations, and big-box stores
big-box stores? where??
used to go between levels so a flat escalator, can take trolleys or there is a trolley chain haul beside. Bunnings (Hammerbarn if you must) have them. Giant tilt slab constructed category killers. Where sprawl is permitted they're a one layer building but in space constrained areas they have two or three (carpark under a 2 layer building) and these walkways exist to get your inflatable shark, chainsaw and bucket of chips down or up, depending.
Every Ikea I've been to has one.
Time traveler: "No, in 120 years we won't have moving sidewalks almost anywhere"
Tech enthusiasts: "Oh what a luddite, didn't you see the demo? This is the future!"
Cars really messed a lot of that up.
In the 1900s every city was walkable. Most cities had trains of some sort for the majority of transport and bikes or horses for the last mile.
It really makes me sad to see even old cartoons showing off the tram systems of the day. Those all got pulled up for "progress" thrusting us all backwards into bumper to bumper traffic.
Whats incredible is that happened almost immediately after expansion of personal vehicles.
That is looking at the past through rose colored glasses. Walkable cities are too small to have the wealth of options a car (or transit) city does.
trains are nice but cars were faster for most (until congestion - but by then there were so few users that service was bad)
> Walkable cities are too small to have the wealth of options a car (or transit) city does.
It's counter intuitive but it's quiet the opposite. I've lived in the UK for a while and in some pretty walkable cities. Even in the smaller cities, what you'd find is a wealth of different shops and options catering to all sorts of needs.
But then just consider that when you are walking you are being exposed to all the shops in the city.
Cars isolate. You are much less likely to notice the hole in the wall specialty shop and you are much more likely to instead just go to a Walmart or national brand place to get what you want. And you'll much more likely want to stop at all in one stores such as Walmart because you don't want to hop in your car multiple times to get the shopping done. In walkable cities, it's almost like a mall experience in every city center. 3 doors down is the hardware store and 2 more stores is the candy shop.
And because that downtown location is a highly desirable place with lots of foot traffic, any shop that goes out of business gets quickly replaced with another. Which means you generally end up with a lot of pretty high quality stores.
That depends on what you are looking for. There are plenty of shops for the common needs - but if you want an odd niche no small walkable area can support it. How many magic stories can your city support? Even something like a guitar shop need a very dense area for people who live in walking distance to be enough to support it. I can think of dozens of other niches - many smaller the above examples.
> but if you want an odd niche no small walkable area can support it.
You'd be really surprised. I knew smaller cities with shops dedicated to Warhammer 40k. [1] (Surprisingly, still in business :) )
> Even something like a guitar shop need a very dense area for people who live in walking distance to be enough to support it.
A guitar shop just needs enough people interested in guitars. Being walkable doesn't mean there's no transit. Usually, walkable cities will have a city center where the shops are concentrated and if the city is big enough, you'll end up with a bus station in the city center. In fact, the referenced city has several of those shops. [2]
This isn't a large city, it's around 100,000. It's also fairly isolated. Nobody is coming to this city to get a guitar.
[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/nzmGkPKBCJi9xCAb7
[2] https://maps.app.goo.gl/gB46tVVRa195NkNs8
Being walkable doesn't preclude having transit though. It does clash with cars because cars need parking, and parking takes so much space that walking distances quickly become an issue. But subways, trams or even buses don't have that issue, they don't meaningfully decrease walkability
European cities are also quite car-infected, but in many the older core still work somewhat similar to how cities worked back then: you have the daily necessities within a 10 minute walk, for anything else you can fetch transit to the city center within 15 minutes, where you generally get everything else (except Ikea)
My point was historical - in 1915 cars were a revolution to the few who had them, and there were so few in cities the downsides were not noticed.
Romanticizing horses, specifically, is a very rose colored glasses situation. At the turn of the last century, cities were getting overwhelmed by thousands of tons of horse feces, a similar volume of their urine, and the carcasses of overworked horses dropping dead in the street.
> Romanticizing horses, specifically, is a very rose colored glasses situation.
Apologies, I wasn't trying to romanticize the horse aspect. Rather, the public transit and train shipping aspect.
In the US, at one point trains were so popular that even rural farms would have small train depots to load up crops on and ultimately ship goods wherever they need to be. You'd even find stores with train station docking.
In fact, before the national highway system, pretty much the only way to travel was by train.
We've taken a costly step backwards by building out the highway system and moving to semi shipping rather than keeping and expanding public transit.
Rail can't take you to suburbs is basically the main reason this happened.
> In the 1900s every city was walkable. Most cities had trains of some sort for the majority of transport and bikes or horses for the last mile.
Not the "last mile". The _only_ mile. Cities were so walkable that London had multiple distinct local accents because people were living their entire lives in one neighborhood, venturing outside only for special occasions.
This changed only with the invention of electric trams that allowed people to relatively cheaply move around. Technically, horse-driven trams were invented a bit earlier but they never got built at scale.
1900s MPEG compression was pretty intense.
i think it's a reupload of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Thomas_Edison,_Panorama_o...
which links to https://lccn.loc.gov/00694271 , but that does not seem to have a digital copy available
edit: well here's an archive but it's not any better https://web.archive.org/web/20231016184047if_/http://memory....
At 5m39s of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1900_-_The_Paris_Expositi... is a higher quality view of the walkway (plus thirty minutes of other sights to behold from that World's Fair).
7m20s of the same video clip features a clip shot of riders on the overhead converyor/walkway.
[the original film was silent, audio is faked]
Thankfully the second video contains a much more watchable film rip.
I like how people getting caught by the cameraman greet him with all little social niceties of that time.
That kid getting slapped on the face in the film! What did he do?
He was a child and probably of a lower (aspirational) class that the guy who slapped him. Children and working-class people having rights is a surprisingly recent concept.
I think he was spinning on a pole adjacent to the sidewalk.
Doesn’t matter, he’s dead now.
Someone else in these comments said s/he wonders what lives the people ended up living who were seen in old photos/videos. Your comment makes me wonder what life this boy (well, he's our senior) lived, and what his impact is beyond being a participant of a curious event in a YouTube video. I guess he had a paper trail, relatives, etc, but there's probably no way to identify him from the present (except if someone's grand-grandkid can give us an anecdote about his grand-grandfather seeing a kid being shoved at the moving walkways in Paris..
Which also applies to all history?
Could you ask him, deadbabe?
It was probably pretty loud
I remember reading about this in Devil in the White City.
> It’s fair to say that few of us now marvel at moving walkways, those standard infrastructural elements of such utilitarian spaces as airport terminals, subway stations, and big-box stores.
You've gotta be referring to escalators here. Never seen a moving walkway in a big-box store, or a subway station for that matter.
There are at least some in the Paris subway, including one that went at 12 km/h but was decommissioned in 2011:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_walkway#Trottoir_roulan...
That one was in activity about the same period I took the Montparnasse station somewhat regularly, and over those years I couldn't ever take it as it was always either broken or running opposite to my direction.
I do think a concept with parallel tracks moving at different speeds would have been easier to use and more reliable though. But it might not have been revolutionary/over-engineered enough to attract attention and subsidies.
Man, they should've designed it similarly to the video, with parallel tracks with differing speeds. But people's lack of attention would probably lead them to park a foot on each track and causing a tumble.
Speaking of speed, in the Stockholm main station the escalators go faster than others I've experienced... But I don't know if they've adjusted the speed since my experience years ago.
> You've gotta be referring to escalators here. Never seen a moving walkway in a big-box store
I have seen some occasionally in stores, in or around Paris. They usually are on an incline to allow trolleys to be taken up or down a level. Or similarly outside malls to get trolleys to the upper level of a car park. That’s in places where you have to stack car parks instead of just having them sprawl all over the place, of course.
> or a subway station for that matter.
There are a few of them in Paris métro stations. Some of them in the London Underground, as well.
There's one in a Target in the LA area. I forget exactly where it is.
There's one in Sydney, from a carpark to near the city centre, of 207m.
Quoting wikipedia:
> The walkway has been the longest continuous moving walkway in the world since its construction in 1961.
Notwithstanding the people responding, yes, it is extremely uncommon in "big box stores".
Not in the US, but in Europe it's more common. Shopping malls in Eastern Europe they're not uncommon.
I've seen them in airports.
i've seen them in a few metro systems, there's definitely one for transfers in barcelona somewhere
Megalopolis
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