4 ms·
High speed moving walkways are usually prone to falling, but also are usually bespoke machines with all the maintenance nightmare that entails. It‘s hard to upk
by bobthepanda 4y ago
High speed moving walkways are usually prone to falling, but also are usually bespoke machines with all the maintenance nightmare that entails. It‘s hard to upkeep lots of normal escalators let alone a specialized one.
- lmm 4y agoTravellators are surely fairly standard - most major airports have dozens. And the Paris metro has enough that I imagine they would reuse one or a handful of common designs across their network.
- bobthepanda 4y agoNormal travelators are very standard. They‘re very slow, though, operating at ~2 km/h What the grandparent is talking about was a high speed travelator that accelerates people to 9km/h to provide shorter journey times. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3001182.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3001182.stm
- tomatocracy 4y agoToronto airport also has (or at least had, it's about 5 years since I was last there) travelators which start slower to allow you to get on/off and then accelerate in the middle (they work by the individual segments getting "longer" and "shorter"). Not sure how fast they go but it definitely feels quite a bit faster than normal ones.
- cperciva 4y agoYes, and they're infamous for breaking all the time.
- dmurray 4y agoIsaac Asimov's Caves of Steel predicted banks of travelators running in parallel, where the one at the edge would go at a walking place and each successive one would go faster so you could travel many miles at 30mph or more.