Asimov went into some detail with this premise too, in Caves of Steel iirc. I suppose he probably got it from Heinlein.

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.”

I think about this every time I get on a moving walkway and wish it had a few more speeds.

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?

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.

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.

Some guy smacks the kid with a light left hook at about 1:14.

Scroll down to the photos and be momentarily surprised at the fact that some are in colour.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

Was this some sort of dress code?

Yes

Every Ikea I've been to has one.

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.

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.

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....

Thankfully the second video contains a much more watchable film rip.

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.

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...

> 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 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