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.
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. ...
Thanks for posting.
mikkupikku 2 hours ago [-]
Asimov went into some detail with this premise too, in Caves of Steel iirc. I suppose he probably got it from Heinlein.
comrade1234 2 hours ago [-]
I think about this every time I get on a moving walkway and wish it had a few more speeds.
JKCalhoun 2 hours ago [-]
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?
bryanrasmussen 1 hours ago [-]
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?
bryanrasmussen 1 hours ago [-]
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.
hmmokidk 4 minutes ago [-]
Two planes are headed towards new york. The first is descending into the city at 805 miles per hour. The second 846 miles per…
OisinMoran 2 hours ago [-]
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.”
troupo 2 hours ago [-]
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.
bobthepanda 2 hours ago [-]
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.
LiquidPolymer 2 hours ago [-]
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.
illusive4080 1 hours ago [-]
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.
jacobsenscott 1 hours ago [-]
Some guy smacks the kid with a light left hook at about 1:14.
mlok 2 hours ago [-]
Wikipedia has a nice page about it : "Rue de l'Avenir" (Street of the future)
ZZ Top's name before it was ZZ Top was Moving Sidewalks
al_borland 3 hours ago [-]
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.
bobthepanda 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ItsHarper 2 hours ago [-]
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.
al_borland 1 hours ago [-]
If I’m understanding what you’re saying, couldn’t that be solved with some kind of belt tensioner?
galaxyLogic 56 minutes ago [-]
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?
moritzwarhier 2 hours ago [-]
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).
bluGill 33 minutes ago [-]
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.
userbinator 1 hours ago [-]
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
bluGill 36 minutes ago [-]
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.
moritzwarhier 1 hours ago [-]
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.
cguess 50 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
bluGill 39 minutes ago [-]
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
shubb 1 hours ago [-]
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.
jonghu 21 minutes ago [-]
Amazing footage.
bofadeez 2 hours ago [-]
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!"
cogman10 2 hours ago [-]
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.
bluGill 30 minutes ago [-]
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)
Timsky 2 hours ago [-]
I like how people getting caught by the cameraman greet him with all little social niceties of that time.
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]
thomastjeffery 2 hours ago [-]
Thankfully the second video contains a much more watchable film rip.
nashashmi 3 hours ago [-]
That kid getting slapped on the face in the film! What did he do?
austinjp 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
vondur 2 hours ago [-]
I think he was spinning on a pole adjacent to the sidewalk.
deadbabe 2 hours ago [-]
Doesn’t matter, he’s dead now.
netsharc 44 minutes ago [-]
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..
delichon 54 minutes ago [-]
Could you ask him, deadbabe?
commandersaki 3 hours ago [-]
I remember reading about this in Devil in the White City.
excalibur 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
emmelaich 28 minutes ago [-]
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.
kergonath 1 hours 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.
dboreham 43 minutes ago [-]
There's one in a Target in the LA area. I forget exactly where it is.
nlehuen 2 hours ago [-]
There are at least some in the Paris subway, including one that went at 12 km/h but was decommissioned in 2011:
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.
cguess 48 minutes ago [-]
Not in the US, but in Europe it's more common. Shopping malls in Eastern Europe they're not uncommon.
userbinator 2 hours ago [-]
I've seen them in airports.
throawayonthe 2 hours ago [-]
i've seen them in a few metro systems, there's definitely one for transfers in barcelona somewhere
wahnfrieden 3 hours ago [-]
Megalopolis
2 hours ago [-]
stealthlogic 55 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 00:41:29 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Seem to recall they were called "slidewalks" by some Sci-Fi author—probably Heinlein, eh?
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rue_de_l%27Avenir
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...
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.
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.
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).
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.
transportation should be about more than just getting from A to B; it should be a pleasure as well
and the minority who are for the ride will figure out how to make it work.
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.
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'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.
Tech enthusiasts: "Oh what a luddite, didn't you see the demo? This is the future!"
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.
trains are nice but cars were faster for most (until congestion - but by then there were so few users that service was bad)
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....
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]
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.
Quoting wikipedia:
> The walkway has been the longest continuous moving walkway in the world since its construction in 1961.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_walkway#Trottoir_roulan...
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.