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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, every
by delichon 1y 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_178.219.147.208/Robert%20A.%20Heinlein%20-%20The%20Roads%20Must%20Roll_4359.pdf https://ia601208.us.archive.org/32/items/calibre_library_178...
- troupo 1y agoIt 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 1y agoPeople 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.
- Animats 1y 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. 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-les-moyens-de-locomotion-terrestre https://www.worldfairs.info/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=125-l...
- rkagerer 1y agoThat link is fantastic, thanks!
- bobthepanda 1y agoit is worth noting that we have transportation systems where you get into a slow moving vehicle that then speeds up. the cable car is a lot safer than a faster moving sidewalk because you can just get inside and sit down securely. of course, it takes up a lot more space and costs a lot more money.
- Animats 1y agoThat's been tried. Never Stop Railway, 1924.[1] The drive system is a variable pitch screw between the rails. Large screw pitch between stations for fast travel, much tighter pitch in stations for very slow movement along the platform. Never tried again with that kind of drive, although there are park rides where the loading platform moves. This requires safety devices and staff to prevent people jams at the end of the platform. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EX_MlWL7YKM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EX_MlWL7YKM
- bobthepanda 1y agoI'm talking about aerial cable cars, which are plenty in use around the world today. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/X5qjnryYWQY https://www.youtube.com/shorts/X5qjnryYWQY They are pretty common tourist transports in mountainous areas and ski resorts. They're even being used for regular public transport now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdTE4TCqkZo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdTE4TCqkZo
- Someone 1y agoAnd you can only hop on/hop off a cable car at predetermined locations. To keep average speed high, those tend to be spaced relatively far apart. I’m not sure about the “takes a lot more space”, and I definitely doubt about the “costs a lot more money”. Using outdoor escalators as proxies, I suspect outdoor moving sidewalks will need lots and lots of maintenance. If you want to have some guarantee of service you’ll also need multiple sidewalks side-by-side.
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y agoOne 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMlLPgAL2h0
- southwindcg 1y agoI believe it was H.G. Wells, in his A Story of the Days to Come (1897) and When the Sleeper Wakes (1899).
- animal531 1y agoBack 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.
- comrade1234 1y agoI think about this every time I get on a moving walkway and wish it had a few more speeds.
- drfenagle 1y agoI think about: https://m.soundcloud.com/thomas-dolby-official/pedestrian-walkway-demo-2009 https://m.soundcloud.com/thomas-dolby-official/pedestrian-wa...
- JKCalhoun 1y agoYeah, 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 1y agoso 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 1y agoAssuming 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 1y agoTwo planes are headed towards new york. The first is descending into the city at 805 miles per hour. The second 846 miles per…
- bryanrasmussen 1y agogiven these facts that I have already laid out, which terrorist has the blue handlebar mustache?
- xarope 1y agowhat color was the bike the ape was riding, when the terrorist with the blue handlebar threw his nails?
- mikkupikku 1y agoAsimov went into some detail with this premise too, in Caves of Steel iirc. I suppose he probably got it from Heinlein.
- pyrale 1y agoVance also had a novel with mechanical roads. I guess that was a common trope back when the first mechanical stairs appeared.
- lloeki 1y agoCaves 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.
- donkey_brains 1y agoHarlan 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.
- OisinMoran 1y agoAlso 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.”
- galaxyLogic 1y agoI 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.
- jdougan 1y agoI think the original was supposed to be to the music from "The Caissons Go Rolling Along".
- Hard_Space 1y agoWow, 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.
- eCa 1y agoThis somehow feels like the horizontal equivalent of a Pater Noster elevator. But probably with even worse error modes if it stops working at 100mph.
- Schiphol 1y agoThere's one of those still in operation at the University of Sheffield! Pretty stressful. https://sheffield.ac.uk/efm/paternoster https://sheffield.ac.uk/efm/paternoster
- ludicrousdispla 1y agoThey 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.
- narag 1y agoThe 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.
- josefx 1y agoOne of the videos in the article mentions an accelerating moving walkway: https://youtu.be/CMlLPgAL2h0?t=240 https://youtu.be/CMlLPgAL2h0?t=240
- pmontra 1y agoThe 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.