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.
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.
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
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.
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
Heinlein too. Seems to have been an exciting idea for a while.
