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"Street of the Future" from the 1900 Paris Expo. The future of transportation: a moving walkway! (upload.wikimedia.org)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/wikipedia@lemmy.world
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Shoutout to the guy at about 0:50 in the video who greets the camera!

From Bill Wurtz:

It's 1900 and the time are going to change

Oh, now I think we're gonna be O.K.

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[–] 17 points 1 week ago* (5 children)

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?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago* (2 children)

    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

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago*

    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.

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