Cool New Scientist article on the technology, promise, and ultimate failure of moving sidewalk systems.
BY 1902, New Yorkers had finally had enough of the rush-hour crush on the Brooklyn Bridge. Mass transit lines converged at both sides of the East river, disgorging thousands of travellers onto already packed streetcars or teeming sidewalks. It was a “daily torture”, wrote one disgruntled commuter. For Bridge Commissioner Gustav Lindenthal there was an obvious solution: a high-speed moving walkway across the bridge.
The first moving walkway had been unveiled eight years earlier at the Chicago World’s Fair and had proved a huge success at subsequent expositions in Berlin and Paris. Chicago’s walkway, the brainchild of engineer Max Schmidt, consisted of three rings, the first stationary, the second moving at 4 kilometres per hour and the third at 8 km/h, an arrangement that allowed walkers to adjust to each speed before moving to the next.
With the Brooklyn Bridge walkway, Schmidt upped the ante. This time he envisaged a loop system at each end of the bridge, with a series of four ever-faster walkways. Passengers moved from one to another until finally taking a seat on the benches aboard the fastest, which whisked them across the bridge at 16 km/h. Because the system ran constantly, there would be no waiting and little momentum lost on stops and starts.
The NYC schemes seem to have been scuttled by powerful interests that owned the extant mass transit systems (trains and busses). The few places where moving sidewalks (or, as Larry Niven used to call them, “slidewalks”) were installed found they were noisy and difficult to maintain if anything fancier than the stretches found at major airports.
Still, I remember the rather improbable “rolling cities” of Heinlein’s “The Roads Must Roll,” and the multi-speed multi-lane creations of Asimov’s Caves of Steel. I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for the technology.