Comment by delichon
6 days ago
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.
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.
Harlan Ellison also referred to “slidewalks”. They form a major plot point in “Repent, Harlequin! Said The Ticktockman”, in which the Harlequin at one point dumps millions of jellybeans on the slidewalk, jamming it and making workers late for their shift.
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.
> 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...
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One of the Canadian airports has a moving walkway that has slow on/off sections and a faster (5mph?) middle. It works a bit like a Ski lift where the chairs (walkway sections) basically bunch up at the start/end to slow down.
Here at 4:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMlLPgAL2h0
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.
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.
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In the UK, Singapore and maybe other countries with British influence, they use the word travelator, which I find quite cool as well.
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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?
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.
Pedestrians would likely not be hit, because few would want to walk there with a 75mph headwind in the first place.
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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.
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Compared to doing that from a moving car?
Everybody carries a gun in Heinlein stories, so those terrorists will be quickly dealt with by armed citizens, thus confirming the superiority of Libertarianism.
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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.