Shoutout to the guy at about 0:50 in the video who greets the camera!
It’s 1900 and the time are going to change
Oh, now I think we’re gonna be O.K.
See no one can use travelators, this is why we can’t have nice things. You’re supposed to walk on them not stand still and getting everyone’s way.
This is why they can only exist in airports, a place they’ve already screened for weapons.
Someone would inevitably drive their car on it. Extra 8mph to their ride to save gas.
This is why they can only exist in airports, a place they’ve already screened for weapons.
An airport is also a contained environment with a dedicated maintenance staff and a budget that can support the expense.
This is a rather complex and failure-prone mechanical device:
Keeping it working all the time means constant labor and a steady flow of replacement parts. Even if we talk about this as a public transit feature of a society that doesn’t use money per se, there has to be a cost-benefit analysis. What value does it add beyond cool factor? people who need mobility help can just use a wheelchair or other personal support, and for everyone else it at best saves them 2-3 minutes of walking. Is that worth the resources invested in maintaining it?
It’s not that bad if you think about it:
The passengers stepped from the platform onto an access sidewalk 80 centimetres (31 in) wide traveling at 4.2 kilometres per hour (2.6 mph), then onto a faster sidewalk 2 metres (6 ft 7 in) wide moving at 8.5 kilometres per hour (5.3 mph). It could simultaneously accommodate 14,000 people; during the afternoon of Easter Day, it carried 70,000 people, while the busiest tram and bus lines carried little more than 40,000 passengers a day on average
Think about such a system near central train stations. You arrive at the central station by train. You hop on that thing and are transported near to your workplace. That could work better than a bus.
Think about such a system near central train stations. You arrive at the central station by train. You hop on that thing and are transported near to your workplace.
Except you would need a path going to every workplace in every direction, and an additional unit every 100m or so per path. Plus, if these are outdoors then they have to be built heavier with more weatherproofing and will require more frequent maintenance to deal with exposure to sun, wind, rain, humidity, temperature changes, dust, trash, vandalism, etc. The entire length of each path will need to be cleaned regularly, so that’s additional staff and equipment cost.
Eventually someone will attempt to move a pallet of bags of concrete mix or bricks or kegs of beer or something. Presumably you don’t want to deal with paying an attendant to monitor every entry/exit point and all of the related employment issues, so either the unit has to be built to handle such situations and maintained against the extra wear-and-tear, or some other sort of usage enforcement has to be put in place.
In contrast, the bus has an attendant who also operates the machine, and can cover a lot more distance using only one motor and drive train system. Loading a pallet of bricks onto a bus would be highly impractical, so nobody tries to do that, so that problem never comes up. Plus, the bus can travel faster than anyone could comfortably handle on a moving walkway. Also, the bus can be driven into a garage whenever maintenance is required, so tools, spare parts, and expert technicians don’t have to be brought to it, it can go where the service is.
And beyond even that, the bus can be rerouted as the city’s needs change. The moving walkway has to be uninstalled and reinstalled in order to change its service area. The walkway is very inflexible.
yea please no
we have enough escalator deaths and that is in a building
Yes it’s a complex device, but so is a bus, and they’re not wear near as efficient. I think we could probably maintain them if we wanted to.
Think about it, it’s superior to every other last mile transport method. It’s continuous, so it’s right there when you need it, with no scheduling required, it doesn’t take up any more space on the sidewalk it replaced while having the exact same function as a sidewalk, it cuts down on journey times and encourages walking.
It even accommodates boring American city grids.
A bus is for sure more efficient per mile than a conveyor.
This is a rather complex and failure-prone mechanical device
Is it though?
According to this link its tech from 1900, how hard could it be? It just goes around and round and round
The technology has improved, so the device is more complicated than the early prototypes. That’s why I included the diagram above.
how hard could it be?
Well, how much mass does it need to move, if it’s 100m long, and is fully loaded with people? To keep it simple, we’ll be generous and assume an average 80kg human, spaced evenly every 1m, so that’s 8000kg of mass that the motor needs to be able to move, constantly. We don’t want the system to change speed under load, but keep a constant speed, so we’ll actually want to be able to handle more than the average load, with room to spare, so call it 12000kg. That’s… a lot of torque.
We’ll also need a compensation mechanism to keep the speed steady as the load on the motor changes, and we’ll need an emergency stop braking system. We’ll need shock absorption to handle the impact of people stepping onto the walkway and potentially dropping any objects they’re carrying, so that the constant load/unload doesn’t cause additional wear on the drive system. We need the mechanism to move the hand railing along with the walkway. We’ll need to run electrical wiring to each unit. We’ll need to dig a hole in the ground to fit the mechanism for each unit. We’ll need to safety check each unit post-install.
This simple-in-theory device is pretty complicated in practice. We haven’t even talked about weatherproofing.
Wear and tear.
Asimov had moving walkways in one if his books! I always thought that they could be extremely cool if indeed you could use them to speed around.
Heinlein too. Seems to have been an exciting idea for a while.
They are a thing already? They look like escalators but flat. At least in Europe and in Japan it’s fairly common, especially between public transportation hubs.
The ones I saw always had handrails on the sides, you couldn’t get on or off at any point, only at the beginning and end. And here and in Asimov’s case there are multiple next to each other with increasing speeds.
I think it’s the difference between fantasy and practicality. In the real world there are pesky safety concerns you have to grapple with that are just ignored in the imagination. I still want to use Asimov’s version
Why were the hats so common?
Why are they not so common?
To protect you from sun and rain I guess?
It still suns and rains though.
