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.
Caves of Steel indeed (I seem to recall a more elaborate section but can't find it again):
There was the usual, entirely normal crowd on the expressway: the standees on the lower level and those with seat privileges above. A continuous trickle of humanity filtered on the expressway, across the decelerating strips to localways or into the stationaries that led under arches or over bridges into the endless mazes of the City
Sections. Another trickle, just as continuous, worked inward from the other side, across the accelerating strips and onto the expressway.
There were the infinite lights: the luminous walls and ceilings that seemed to drip cool, even phosphorescence; the flashing advertisements screaming for attention; the harsh, steady gleam of the “lightworms” that directed THIS WAY TO JERSEY SECTIONS, FOLLOW ARROWS TO EAST RIVER SHUTTLE, UPPER LEVEL FOR ALL WAYS TO LONG ISLAND SECTIONS.
Most of all there was the noise that was inseparable from life: the sound of millions talking, laughing, coughing, calling, humming, breathing.
No directions anywhere to Spacetown, thought Baley.
He stepped from strip to strip with the ease of a lifetime’s practice. Children learned to “hop the strips” as soon as they learned to walk. Baley scarcely felt the jerk of acceleration as his velocity increased with each step. He was not even aware that he leaned forward against the force. In thirty seconds he had reached the final
sixty-mile-an-hour strip and could step aboard the railed and glassed-in moving platform that was the expressway.
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.”
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.
Back in the heyday there was this idea of the arcology where a group of people had it with their government and made their own city-utopia which would rule itself.
Very often in those they featured technology like the staggered automated walkways for transporting people around, etc.
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?
They have an inner and outer set of moving sidewalks as the loading area for one of the Harry Potter Universal Orlando rides (the one in Hogwart's Castle.) It's extremely disorienting at first but they have lots of staff moving people into the seats, so no one ends up hitting the walls.
We were casually waiting in line for a while, then suddenly we were led into the area to get onto the ride and had a 'holy shit, they're serious about this one' moment.
Edit: the Universal Hollywood ride doesn't seem to have this (as of 2024), so I'm not sure if the Orlando one still does.
The slow strips on the outside moved at five miles an hour; the inner ones faster and faster...
Not good enough. The same strip should go faster and faster over time and decelerate near its end. It sounds impossible, but I can think of a few ways to make it work.
The naive implementation is a train: everybody enters at once at a fixed point, the strip accelerates, everybody leave at the next stop or stay for the next stop. I wonder if you devised a way to make people keep accelerating while other enter and leave the strip. Side strips at lower speeds are too easy a solution.
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 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.
Not to be grim, but he was the perfect age class to spend 4 years in the trenches...
The French males born in 1894 had a 92% mobilization rate (those who survived infant mortality that was still huge at the time). In 1920, only 48% of this age class was still alive (the big three killer being infant mortality, combat losses and the "Spanish" (Kansas) flu).
There's a German black-and-white comedy "Die Feuerzangenbowle" from 1944 and most of the actors knew this was going to be their last film. They were drafted into the war right after filming wrapped up and all of them died, apart from the main star.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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 was explicitly refering to buses because of that, or had in mind something like modern IT plus ride sharing: to use cars more efficiently.
And, in opposition to the other comment thread, my opinion is that this would improve the quality of life for people in the long-term (in urban areas, even in the relatively short term).
But without FSD, it requires drivers, so it requires more complex considerations than "just" directing cars to where there needed.
At this point, the discussion becomes tiresome and political.
But to me, the convenience of personally owned vehicles combined with the public infrastructure needed for them is inefficient in a way that affects people negatively in urban spaces.
"Space efficiency" to me would also mean to stop making life worse for people who, for whatever reason, happen to be outside but not in a car or, god forbid, need to get to places without owning a car.
I'm not dreaming of a world without cars, but I detest the concrete wasteland that I have to live in for having destroyed quality of life in favor of an excess of parking and driving areas. So I'd certainly like a world with way fewer cars and certainly I am against further increasing excess cars per person. But, like I said, to use cars efficiently, there needs to be a consensus.
Because cars require public space, and lots of it.
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.
As far as I'm concerned, transportation is solved. I live in Paris, there are 14 (soon to be 15) metro lines covering the city in a dense underground mesh, and you never have to wait more the 5 minutes to hop into one.
Paris doesn't have the best transit in the world, but they get credit for being very good and useful. Most of the world has a lot to learn from them. Most people don't live in places with transport anywhere near that good.
Don't get complainant. There is still a lot Paris needs to improve on. Please show the world what the next level looks like.
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
Probably because for most locations, they are actually not very useful, but quite expensive and just cumbersome. They take up space, and create artificial travel-zones, and at the same time they don't even enhance the flow, because most people tend to stand still on them. For safety-reasons (and probably costs) they are usually just around walking speed. So it's overall just a fancy gadget which is only beneficial for heavy luggage or people with special demands. For those situations, we often have better and cheaper solutions.
Maybe because in airports people are sometimes required to walk long distances to go from one point to another, while in a city there are public transport, bicycles, taxis, etc. plenty of other options so walking long distances is usually not required.
I think moving sidewalks could be more suitable for shorter distances than public transport or taxis. In many situations, it doesn’t make sense to order a taxi for a trip of less than 1,000 meters, or to walk to the nearest bus stop, then wait for the bus, just to travel a single stop. There are many people with disabilities who may struggle to walk these distances and would benefit from such an option. Additionally, moving sidewalks could reduce the time it takes to travel short distances within cities.
Anyone have info on how energy-efficient moving walkways are on a person-mile basis? I'm guessing not very, but I'd love to be wrong. Taking a moving walkway instead of a subway would be awesome (assuming you could figure out the speed aspect, obviously).
During the mid 2000, an experimentation in the Montparnasse metro station in Paris transformed a moving sidewalk in order to have an acceleration ramp from 3 to 9km/h. It was slower(most of the time) than the 1900 expo's 10km/h. And there always was a "slower" sidewalk (3km/h, the default) next to it. The goal was to go up to 11km/h (it did at some point). And yet it failed, and was removed 15 years ago. Only the slow options remain.
Asimov describes networks of moving walkways on Earth. There are several adjacent ones with different speeds, and the central one is the fastest. People optimize their journeys by entering the network from the outside and gradually moving to the faster inner beltway. And vice versa when they approach their destination. It's very detailed, quite realistic… and inspiring.
Between futurama pneumatic tube, and walkalators, are there any other proposals for infra scale "pedestrian" mobilitiy. Faster/less walking seemed like one of those things futurist urbanists use to waste time speculativing now, now we've settled on escooters and exoskeletons?
> 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.
only those that carry the shopping trolleys up/downstairs, designed so the wheels get locked into place.
I have never seen a flat one in anything else but airports or connections between other mass transit transports such as metros and trains. Definitely not in big box stores as they would be inconvenient and slower than pushing the trolley in the flat.
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.
They also make it way easier to great people even over some distance, without awkwardly moving your hand in the air or shouting and annoying all the others.
Men wearing hats is still quite common today. But the style has changed to baseball caps and similar forms. Most of those "dress codes" usually also have a more practical origin. So it's less of a code, and more a practical benefit.
If you are interested in this topic, especially from the US perspective, I recommend this book: https://www.alibris.com/Hatless-Jack-The-President-the-Fedor... . There was apparently significant social pressure for all men to wear hats until the mid C 20th.
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.
I ponder this kind of things from time to time. This one makes a very enjoyable puzzle because it is extremely simply to move people on a conveyor or a rolling platform but amazingly complicated to get them on and off if you want to run it at any meaninfull speed, absurdly complicated.
My mental gymnastics is mostly trying to mobilize an entire city with the concept. I see some research suggesting there is lots of room between walking and driving distance. Bringing a bicycle also has its down sides.
Because getting on and off is already so difficult one tends not to notice the other problems with the tech. A simple crossroad is already a problem.
Moving fast is no issue for the more athletic passenger without luggage. It is also the most useless device to them. People with mobility issues don't have to get on but they do have to cross the road.
You would want to slow down or stop the surface, put a fence around it, you would want chairs, a roof would be nice, perhaps walls so that you can further control the climate. And then you have a bus, metro or tram. (haha)
One cool variation (not my idea) was to have a moving platform fromwhich to get in and out of a moving train, tram or metro. You could also make vehicles that connect on the sides. Those would have lots of fragile moving parts and potential dangerous situations if they fail. I see a night train misaligned with the station one time with the last door opening above the entrance of a pedestrian tunnel. A drunk guy almost walked out into the 5 meter drop. That seems preferable over falling between two moving trains.
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..
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...
Asimov went into some detail with this premise too, in Caves of Steel iirc. I suppose he probably got it from Heinlein.
Caves of Steel indeed (I seem to recall a more elaborate section but can't find it again):
There was the usual, entirely normal crowd on the expressway: the standees on the lower level and those with seat privileges above. A continuous trickle of humanity filtered on the expressway, across the decelerating strips to localways or into the stationaries that led under arches or over bridges into the endless mazes of the City Sections. Another trickle, just as continuous, worked inward from the other side, across the accelerating strips and onto the expressway.
There were the infinite lights: the luminous walls and ceilings that seemed to drip cool, even phosphorescence; the flashing advertisements screaming for attention; the harsh, steady gleam of the “lightworms” that directed THIS WAY TO JERSEY SECTIONS, FOLLOW ARROWS TO EAST RIVER SHUTTLE, UPPER LEVEL FOR ALL WAYS TO LONG ISLAND SECTIONS.
Most of all there was the noise that was inseparable from life: the sound of millions talking, laughing, coughing, calling, humming, breathing.
No directions anywhere to Spacetown, thought Baley.
He stepped from strip to strip with the ease of a lifetime’s practice. Children learned to “hop the strips” as soon as they learned to walk. Baley scarcely felt the jerk of acceleration as his velocity increased with each step. He was not even aware that he leaned forward against the force. In thirty seconds he had reached the final sixty-mile-an-hour strip and could step aboard the railed and glassed-in moving platform that was the expressway.
No directions to Spacetown, he thought.
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Vance also had a novel with mechanical roads. I guess that was a common trope back when the first mechanical stairs appeared.
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.
I think the original was supposed to be to the music from "The Caissons 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.”
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.
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I believe it was H.G. Wells, in his A Story of the Days to Come (1897) and When the Sleeper Wakes (1899).
Back in the heyday there was this idea of the arcology where a group of people had it with their government and made their own city-utopia which would rule itself.
Very often in those they featured technology like the staggered automated walkways for transporting people around, etc.
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.
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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?
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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.
There's one of those still in operation at the University of Sheffield! Pretty stressful. https://sheffield.ac.uk/efm/paternoster
They have an inner and outer set of moving sidewalks as the loading area for one of the Harry Potter Universal Orlando rides (the one in Hogwart's Castle.) It's extremely disorienting at first but they have lots of staff moving people into the seats, so no one ends up hitting the walls.
We were casually waiting in line for a while, then suddenly we were led into the area to get onto the ride and had a 'holy shit, they're serious about this one' moment.
Edit: the Universal Hollywood ride doesn't seem to have this (as of 2024), so I'm not sure if the Orlando one still does.
The slow strips on the outside moved at five miles an hour; the inner ones faster and faster...
Not good enough. The same strip should go faster and faster over time and decelerate near its end. It sounds impossible, but I can think of a few ways to make it work.
The naive implementation is a train: everybody enters at once at a fixed point, the strip accelerates, everybody leave at the next stop or stay for the next stop. I wonder if you devised a way to make people keep accelerating while other enter and leave the strip. Side strips at lower speeds are too easy a solution.
One of the videos in the article mentions an accelerating moving walkway: https://youtu.be/CMlLPgAL2h0?t=240
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 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.
Not to be grim, but he was the perfect age class to spend 4 years in the trenches...
The French males born in 1894 had a 92% mobilization rate (those who survived infant mortality that was still huge at the time). In 1920, only 48% of this age class was still alive (the big three killer being infant mortality, combat losses and the "Spanish" (Kansas) flu).
See figure 2a in https://shs.cairn.info/revue-population-et-societes-2014-4-p...
There's a German black-and-white comedy "Die Feuerzangenbowle" from 1944 and most of the actors knew this was going to be their last film. They were drafted into the war right after filming wrapped up and all of them died, apart from the main star.
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> 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?
The article nicely points out that New York City also had an elevated sidewalk (or plans) in the late 1800s!
Here are the designs and sketches. It sounds so reasonable. I am curious why they didn't keep it.
https://culturenow.org/site/a5883d3d-b1fa-4cb1-a6ca-a3a692e5...
https://www.6sqft.com/in-1872-broadway-almost-became-a-giant...
Then the car industry got rid of the idea (along with the trams).
https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2016/06/a-city-of-bridges-...
https://www.nytimes.com/1915/05/06/archives/elevated-sidewal...
https://www.archpaper.com/2015/11/long-history-tall-sidewalk...
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...
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.
> 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.
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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.
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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)
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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 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?
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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.
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.
> 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 was explicitly refering to buses because of that, or had in mind something like modern IT plus ride sharing: to use cars more efficiently.
And, in opposition to the other comment thread, my opinion is that this would improve the quality of life for people in the long-term (in urban areas, even in the relatively short term).
But without FSD, it requires drivers, so it requires more complex considerations than "just" directing cars to where there needed.
At this point, the discussion becomes tiresome and political.
But to me, the convenience of personally owned vehicles combined with the public infrastructure needed for them is inefficient in a way that affects people negatively in urban spaces.
"Space efficiency" to me would also mean to stop making life worse for people who, for whatever reason, happen to be outside but not in a car or, god forbid, need to get to places without owning a car.
I'm not dreaming of a world without cars, but I detest the concrete wasteland that I have to live in for having destroyed quality of life in favor of an excess of parking and driving areas. So I'd certainly like a world with way fewer cars and certainly I am against further increasing excess cars per person. But, like I said, to use cars efficiently, there needs to be a consensus.
Because cars require public space, and lots of it.
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.
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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.
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As far as I'm concerned, transportation is solved. I live in Paris, there are 14 (soon to be 15) metro lines covering the city in a dense underground mesh, and you never have to wait more the 5 minutes to hop into one.
Paris doesn't have the best transit in the world, but they get credit for being very good and useful. Most of the world has a lot to learn from them. Most people don't live in places with transport anywhere near that good.
Don't get complainant. There is still a lot Paris needs to improve on. Please show the world what the next level looks like.
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
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ZZ Top's name before it was ZZ Top was Moving Sidewalks
Does anyone know why we don't have these anymore, except in buildings like airports and shopping malls?
Probably because for most locations, they are actually not very useful, but quite expensive and just cumbersome. They take up space, and create artificial travel-zones, and at the same time they don't even enhance the flow, because most people tend to stand still on them. For safety-reasons (and probably costs) they are usually just around walking speed. So it's overall just a fancy gadget which is only beneficial for heavy luggage or people with special demands. For those situations, we often have better and cheaper solutions.
Maybe because in airports people are sometimes required to walk long distances to go from one point to another, while in a city there are public transport, bicycles, taxis, etc. plenty of other options so walking long distances is usually not required.
I think moving sidewalks could be more suitable for shorter distances than public transport or taxis. In many situations, it doesn’t make sense to order a taxi for a trip of less than 1,000 meters, or to walk to the nearest bus stop, then wait for the bus, just to travel a single stop. There are many people with disabilities who may struggle to walk these distances and would benefit from such an option. Additionally, moving sidewalks could reduce the time it takes to travel short distances within cities.
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They're very unreliable because of the constant wear, slow compared to other modes, and dangerous for crowds and demographics with limited mobility.
Outdoor variants don't protect riders from weather, and having to deal with extremes of cold, damp, and heat makes them even less robust.
Filmed by James Henry White. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H._White
Anyone have info on how energy-efficient moving walkways are on a person-mile basis? I'm guessing not very, but I'd love to be wrong. Taking a moving walkway instead of a subway would be awesome (assuming you could figure out the speed aspect, obviously).
Previous comment thread has an interesting conversation about why it hasn’t became a thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45793466#45793922
London had a spiral escalator in 1906, sadly not captured on film
https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/blog/spiral-escalator-engineering...
During the mid 2000, an experimentation in the Montparnasse metro station in Paris transformed a moving sidewalk in order to have an acceleration ramp from 3 to 9km/h. It was slower(most of the time) than the 1900 expo's 10km/h. And there always was a "slower" sidewalk (3km/h, the default) next to it. The goal was to go up to 11km/h (it did at some point). And yet it failed, and was removed 15 years ago. Only the slow options remain.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trottoir_roulant_rapide#/media...
You can see it in action here: https://youtu.be/FBzlEG3tMuw?t=399
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
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.
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
Asimov describes networks of moving walkways on Earth. There are several adjacent ones with different speeds, and the central one is the fastest. People optimize their journeys by entering the network from the outside and gradually moving to the faster inner beltway. And vice versa when they approach their destination. It's very detailed, quite realistic… and inspiring.
Between futurama pneumatic tube, and walkalators, are there any other proposals for infra scale "pedestrian" mobilitiy. Faster/less walking seemed like one of those things futurist urbanists use to waste time speculativing now, now we've settled on escooters and exoskeletons?
> 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.
Decomissioned but still rolling, just slower.
> 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.
only those that carry the shopping trolleys up/downstairs, designed so the wheels get locked into place.
I have never seen a flat one in anything else but airports or connections between other mass transit transports such as metros and trains. Definitely not in big box stores as they would be inconvenient and slower than pushing the trolley in the flat.
I've seen them in airports.
i've seen them in a few metro systems, there's definitely one for transfers in barcelona somewhere
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.
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.
They also make it way easier to great people even over some distance, without awkwardly moving your hand in the air or shouting and annoying all the others.
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Men wearing hats is still quite common today. But the style has changed to baseball caps and similar forms. Most of those "dress codes" usually also have a more practical origin. So it's less of a code, and more a practical benefit.
If you are interested in this topic, especially from the US perspective, I recommend this book: https://www.alibris.com/Hatless-Jack-The-President-the-Fedor... . There was apparently significant social pressure for all men to wear hats until the mid C 20th.
Was this some sort of dress code?
Yes
The last US president to wear a Lincoln-style stovepipe hat was ... JFK
I like how people getting caught by the cameraman greet him with all little social niceties of that time.
It’s amazing how ideas from over a century ago still feel futuristic today.
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.
I ponder this kind of things from time to time. This one makes a very enjoyable puzzle because it is extremely simply to move people on a conveyor or a rolling platform but amazingly complicated to get them on and off if you want to run it at any meaninfull speed, absurdly complicated.
My mental gymnastics is mostly trying to mobilize an entire city with the concept. I see some research suggesting there is lots of room between walking and driving distance. Bringing a bicycle also has its down sides.
Because getting on and off is already so difficult one tends not to notice the other problems with the tech. A simple crossroad is already a problem.
Moving fast is no issue for the more athletic passenger without luggage. It is also the most useless device to them. People with mobility issues don't have to get on but they do have to cross the road.
You would want to slow down or stop the surface, put a fence around it, you would want chairs, a roof would be nice, perhaps walls so that you can further control the climate. And then you have a bus, metro or tram. (haha)
One cool variation (not my idea) was to have a moving platform fromwhich to get in and out of a moving train, tram or metro. You could also make vehicles that connect on the sides. Those would have lots of fragile moving parts and potential dangerous situations if they fail. I see a night train misaligned with the station one time with the last door opening above the entrance of a pedestrian tunnel. A drunk guy almost walked out into the 5 meter drop. That seems preferable over falling between two moving trains.
It seems disney's HollowTile floor might be just the right interface.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68YMEmaF0rs&t=181s
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..
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Could you ask him, deadbabe?
Which also applies to all history?
I remember reading about this in Devil in the White City.
Oldies were more futuristic than us ;)
Megalopolis
It was probably pretty loud
sad the compression on the video is so high
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