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.
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.
While you ride
While you glide
We are watching down inside
that your roadways go rolling along. ...
“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.”
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.
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.
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-l...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_walkway#Trottoir_roulan...
It was very clever how they did the acceleration/deceleration - the "tiles" of the walkway fit together in such a way that each could slide on top of the next one, and at the two ends the tiles would gradually slide closer together (decelerating) or further apart (accelerating).
of course, it takes up a lot more space and costs a lot more money.
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.
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
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.
Here at 4:00
Very often in those they featured technology like the staggered automated walkways for transporting people around, etc.
Seem to recall they were called "slidewalks" by some Sci-Fi author—probably Heinlein, eh?
Ooohhh boy.
The consul's tale should be required reading for anyone working in the tech field.
Funnily, every syncthing node on my network has a Farcaster folder.
Maybe I should read it again sometime.
Now I want to learn to use the CFD kit and figure out what it’d be.
Heinlein formally disowned some of those ideas, but did so under the duress of the McCarthy era and the Red Scare. Yet he also kept writing about them, just somewhat cloaked. Both "Stranger in a Strange Land" and "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" are some of the most Socialist books I've ever read, if you assume the first person narrators are for the most part bloviating Vonnegut-esque patsies (rather than the author stand-ins they are often read to be; Heinlein seemed to clever for that). "Stranger in a Strange Land" is entirely about community effort and Socialism. It contrasts interestingly with "For Us, The Living" in part because cynicism seems to have been the big shift and Heinlein can no longer imagine America leading the charge towards Socialism and invents a dead Martian race to do it. "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" is often credited as a deeply Libertarian book, but I think a lot of that is misreading the narrative and not paying attention to especially the second half of the book, which is entirely about AI-lead worker's strikes towards the goals of unionization. The first half sounds like a Libertarian dream and the narrator character describes it in lush terms that make it sound so, but plot is about overthrowing that and building a much more Socialist Moon together. Heinlein even comments about that misreading in "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls" which intentionally begins on a Moon like the one people reading the first half of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" seem to love, dialed up to 11 to better make it a grungy harsh Noir place for a classic gumshoe-for-hire to live, and eventually through world hopping the main character does happen to stop by "Mike's Moon" (Heinlein actually names his timelines based on the first man to step foot on the moon, I'm feeling to lazy to look this one up, but this timeline is also prominently known for a Moon AI named "Mike") after the events of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and it reads a lot more Socialist and lot kinder than the protagonist's Moon the book started in.
A lot of modern Libertarians wouldn't expect a crossover boundary with Socialism like Social Credit, which is one of the problems with claiming politics is a spectrum or plane (there are more useful curves where ideologies meet than that), and a lot of modern Libertarians don't trust ideas like UBI and universal health care and don't trust things like unions again this century (despite having past pro-worker/pro-union perspectives), so it is easy to claim that Heinlein shifted over 20 years. But also, if Heinlein was a Social Credit + Libertarian throughout his life, the rest of politics shifted so much around Heinlein that he may have stayed in exactly the same place and it looked like he shifted.
I think his writing certainly shifted, but I think towards cynicism and anger and frustration after WWII and especially after the Red Scare, not necessarily towards deeper Libertarianism.
I also think there are lessons there for modern Libertarians, too. There are modern Libertarians feeling receptive to talking about ideas like UBI again as something that can have space in Libertarian conversations. There could be room in American politics again for a party like Social Credit that can be a coalition between Libertarian values and Democratic Socialist ones. The Libertarians could find better creative allies than destructive tendencies of "the far right". Talking about Heinlein's books isn't a bad place to start those conversations.
I'd like to be there for a debate between 1940 Heinlein and 1980 Heinlein. I wouldn't be surprised if that event is scheduled for the Howard family reunion at the end of time and Time Enough for Love.
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.
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.
This kid had to know what a camera was, which end was filming (some early film cameras appeared to be simple boxes), and wanted to make his mark on the final product.
Every time I watch old films with children in them I always think about how they’ve been dead, hopefully of old age, for a long time already.
The French males born in 1894 had a 92% mobilization rate (those who survived infant mortality that was still huge at the time). In 1920, only 48% of this age class was still alive (the big three killer being infant mortality, combat losses and the "Spanish" (Kansas) flu).
See figure 2a in https://shs.cairn.info/revue-population-et-societes-2014-4-p...
The trivia section of the German wiki page of the same film says there's a disputed rumour that the film was prolonged to help the young extras avoid conscription.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Feuerzangenbowle_(1944_fil...
I've got movies (black & white, no audio) recorded on a "Pathe-Baby" camera [1] from my grand-mother and her sister, my great-aunt, in the early 1920s, where they're both little girls playing.
I knew them both very well, they lived through WWII in Europe and they both died old. My great-aunt lived until her 100th year.
Very few things are as moving as this little, short Pathe Baby vids I've got of them.
A few years ago we asked a little local shop to convert these to digital format and these files are precious treasure in the family.
Here are the designs and sketches. It sounds so reasonable. I am curious why they didn't keep it.
https://culturenow.org/site/a5883d3d-b1fa-4cb1-a6ca-a3a692e5...
https://www.6sqft.com/in-1872-broadway-almost-became-a-giant...
Then the car industry got rid of the idea (along with the trams).
https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2016/06/a-city-of-bridges-...
https://www.nytimes.com/1915/05/06/archives/elevated-sidewal...
https://www.archpaper.com/2015/11/long-history-tall-sidewalk...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Autochromes
Leonid Andreev's moody selfie poses amuse me. (Circa 1910.)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Autochromes_by_L...
Tech enthusiasts: "Oh what a luddite, didn't you see the demo? This is the future!"
In the 1900s every city was walkable. Most cities had trains of some sort for the majority of transport and bikes or horses for the last mile.
It really makes me sad to see even old cartoons showing off the tram systems of the day. Those all got pulled up for "progress" thrusting us all backwards into bumper to bumper traffic.
Whats incredible is that happened almost immediately after expansion of personal vehicles.
Not the "last mile". The _only_ mile. Cities were so walkable that London had multiple distinct local accents because people were living their entire lives in one neighborhood, venturing outside only for special occasions.
This changed only with the invention of electric trams that allowed people to relatively cheaply move around. Technically, horse-driven trams were invented a bit earlier but they never got built at scale.
See the Underground for an example.
Might even be 70 years see the London-Greenwich railway for the first instance.
London and Paris were real outliners, with the early adoption of steam-powered subways. Mostly because they had to due to their size, but it really was the tram that initially allowed the working-class city population to commute freely.
It's also interesting that it coincides with the significant boost in productivity, and also with general improvements to workers' rights.
Apologies, I wasn't trying to romanticize the horse aspect. Rather, the public transit and train shipping aspect.
In the US, at one point trains were so popular that even rural farms would have small train depots to load up crops on and ultimately ship goods wherever they need to be. You'd even find stores with train station docking.
In fact, before the national highway system, pretty much the only way to travel was by train.
We've taken a costly step backwards by building out the highway system and moving to semi shipping rather than keeping and expanding public transit.
trains are nice but cars were faster for most (until congestion - but by then there were so few users that service was bad)
It's counter intuitive but it's quiet the opposite. I've lived in the UK for a while and in some pretty walkable cities. Even in the smaller cities, what you'd find is a wealth of different shops and options catering to all sorts of needs.
But then just consider that when you are walking you are being exposed to all the shops in the city.
Cars isolate. You are much less likely to notice the hole in the wall specialty shop and you are much more likely to instead just go to a Walmart or national brand place to get what you want. And you'll much more likely want to stop at all in one stores such as Walmart because you don't want to hop in your car multiple times to get the shopping done. In walkable cities, it's almost like a mall experience in every city center. 3 doors down is the hardware store and 2 more stores is the candy shop.
And because that downtown location is a highly desirable place with lots of foot traffic, any shop that goes out of business gets quickly replaced with another. Which means you generally end up with a lot of pretty high quality stores.
You'd be really surprised. I knew smaller cities with shops dedicated to Warhammer 40k. [1] (Surprisingly, still in business :) )
> Even something like a guitar shop need a very dense area for people who live in walking distance to be enough to support it.
A guitar shop just needs enough people interested in guitars. Being walkable doesn't mean there's no transit. Usually, walkable cities will have a city center where the shops are concentrated and if the city is big enough, you'll end up with a bus station in the city center. In fact, the referenced city has several of those shops. [2]
This isn't a large city, it's around 100,000. It's also fairly isolated. Nobody is coming to this city to get a guitar.
How many of the customers of the Warhammer store walked there from their house? How many came from a different cities because it was the closest store? The store does well because it can draw from a much larger area than a pure walking (or the limited trams of back then)
Similar for guitars - I expect a city of 100k to support 1-2 guitar stores - but I expect the majority of customers are not walking. Maybe they drive, maybe they take transit.
Not in the UK but yes in the US (in the 1900s, only 10% of the UK population farmed. Most were in the service industry and manufacturing). There's also a very different city layouts in the UK vs the US.
If you were a farmer in the US in the 1900s, you'd mostly likely ride a horse.
> How many of the customers of the Warhammer store walked there from their house?
Almost 0, but a very large percentage got there via bus and walked from the bus station to the store. For these older cities that's just how it has to be because there's no room for parking.
In the context of the 1900s, biking and walking is how people would get around in the UK, they'd simply not go downtown as often. In that city in particular there are a TON of old walking trails from the outskirts to town center. I know because I walked them.
You might think "Well, it's a 1 or 2 miles away, that's just too far" but honestly when all you are used to is walking it's not. It was just more expected that taking an hour long walk happens.
> How many came from a different cities because it was the closest store?
For that city, almost 0. It's way too isolated. Even today in england you'll find a lot of people that very rarely leave the city they were born in.
> but I expect the majority of customers are not walking. Maybe they drive, maybe they take transit.
Most of it will be park and walk. You are correct in assuming that they'll likely take transit or drive to a closer location. However, because not every store has parking like the US, it's most likely that they'll have to walk some distance to and from the store however they decide to get there.
If you click around the shrewsbury city in google earth street view, what you'll notice is very few cars in the city center and a lot of people walking around.
Most of the city center is inaccessible by car. Parking your car is expensive, driving is discouraged.
Removing cars means there's more space for people. It means it's safer, quieter. I'm not in mortal panic if my 4 years old drops my hand. It means the bus isn't stuck in traffic, and is therefore really fast. It's the most vibrant place I've ever lived in. It's full of life and energy.
The city is full of small, independent shops.
A boardgames café:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+Boardroom/@52.3864335,...
A guitar shop:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Alphenaar+Muziekhandel/@52...
A tabletop store, hosting MTG tournaments on a regular basis:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Tabletop+Kingdom+Haarlem/@...
A store fully dedicated to expensive collectibles:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Past+Joys/@52.3798456,4.63...
There's a ton of small shops, whose names I can't remember, that I only discovered because I happened to walk past them. This creates a positive feedback loop. It's rewarding to just wander about, because you may discover something.
European cities are also quite car-infected, but in many the older core still work somewhat similar to how cities worked back then: you have the daily necessities within a 10 minute walk, for anything else you can fetch transit to the city center within 15 minutes, where you generally get everything else (except Ikea)
We also seem to be unable to perfectly match food and hand speed these days. I’m not sure if this is a “feature” somehow, but it bothers me a lot. They didn’t seem to have this issue with the floor and fence, as far as I could tell.
The system used in Paris requires a giant bulb shape to turn around the fence, which is generally a lot harder and more expensive to accommodate.
I installed a new steering box in my Jeep a few years ago - or at least, I think that’s the name of the component, but it seems wrong to my ear. The part that converts rotational motion of the steering wheel into linear motion in the steering components for the front wheels.
Anyhow, it was very tight. Not only was there no play, but I could tell it was taxing my power steering system more than normal. It took about a year for that to level out, and another 2-3 years for it to feel “normal” again. Another ~5 years and it would have exhibited perceptible “play” in the steering.
You could probably use a roller on the back side of the drive pulley to automatically adjust it, too. No electromechanical stuff needed.
Oh, and add a “squealer” - a piece of metal that makes an awful racket once the drive pulley wears down to a critical point, prompting those responsible that it should be replaced before it begins to induce unacceptable wear on the belt itself.
For example, transportation of people with the modern extensive net of streets would be most convenient and efficient if there was some kind of public transportation in small buses, available on demand and price being determined by regular market mechanisms. The difference between what I imagine and things like Uber would be a strong integration with existing train and bus lines, and public funding and legislation. Maybe self-driving will get us there, but there are also many political hurdles that make the less efficient option (high coefficient of cars pp) more attractive than the alternative that could provide better efficiency (and, ideally, also great user experience).
making on denand reliable means that there are more vehicles driving around than we now have cars - as empty vehicles reposition just in case someone else wants to go someplace right after you.
I was explicitly refering to buses because of that, or had in mind something like modern IT plus ride sharing: to use cars more efficiently.
And, in opposition to the other comment thread, my opinion is that this would improve the quality of life for people in the long-term (in urban areas, even in the relatively short term).
But without FSD, it requires drivers, so it requires more complex considerations than "just" directing cars to where there needed.
At this point, the discussion becomes tiresome and political.
But to me, the convenience of personally owned vehicles combined with the public infrastructure needed for them is inefficient in a way that affects people negatively in urban spaces.
"Space efficiency" to me would also mean to stop making life worse for people who, for whatever reason, happen to be outside but not in a car or, god forbid, need to get to places without owning a car.
I'm not dreaming of a world without cars, but I detest the concrete wasteland that I have to live in for having destroyed quality of life in favor of an excess of parking and driving areas. So I'd certainly like a world with way fewer cars and certainly I am against further increasing excess cars per person. But, like I said, to use cars efficiently, there needs to be a consensus.
Because cars require public space, and lots of it.
transportation should be about more than just getting from A to B; it should be a pleasure as well
In contrast European trains are down right relaxing.
and the minority who are for the ride will figure out how to make it work.
Time matters in the above. If your trip is 15-20 minutes time to unwind seems to be universal and so almost nobody really has anything they want to do. If you trip if an hour that is cutting into other things in life. (Note that I didn't mention how you take the trip in this part, people who drive fast the same time concerns for longer trips)
I think a lot of the non rush hour usage is like that.
The train itself is pleasant off peak - table, wifi, I drink coffee and websurf. It's a bit squished in during rush hour though.
Used to take an hour to drive 11 miles down 101 to downtown vs 25 minute on the B line.
Life is about the journey. All those roads and other boring means of transportation are just places no one wants to be.
On the more realistic end of things, ebikes are fun.
>e-biking over a bridge, preferably at night — has developed its own ardent following. Liberated for the most part of any physical exertion, e-bikers can instead focus on the texture of the road vibrating up their arms, the wind streaking across their cheeks, the speed heightening their consciousness. “You do it in the evening, with the sunset — hell yeah,” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/05/nyregion/eric-adams-nyc-s...
I ask him things like, what about working from home? That would be terrible! He replied with a sour face.
But the knife cuts both ways. If you hate the rollercoasters you will be so happy when it is finally over. The pretzels will taste even better.
Some will feel your suffering when they see it, some will enjoy seeing it.
Most people would have every other city in the world where they can be practical, sober or boring, depending on who you ask.
Most people can't always have what they want and they shouldn't. It wouldn't be good for them :-)
For many disabled people driving isn’t really possible. Now they have to hop on a rollercoaster ?
High speed rail would be more than enough for me. DC to NYC in 1 hour flat. Philly to NYC in 30 min.
Sacramento to SF in 1 hour, which would allow for normal people to buy homes and commute into town.
The majority of uses should be for people trying to get someplace. If the trip is also fun that is a bonus, but if it is only fun but otherwise worthless (that is something else is enough better) your system won't get many riders.
A lot of people have recreational boats. They go places but the destination isn't half the fun. With cruse ships the destination is perhaps 5-10%?
Maybe we got it all wrong. Perhaps trains should have lan gaming. Have some exclusieve game that one can only play in the train with some exclusive content for the specific trip.
One could also do exclusive interactive educational material. There is a lot to learn before you become a train driver, train manager, mechanic, engineer, cleaner, etc etc
Don't get complainant. There is still a lot Paris needs to improve on. Please show the world what the next level looks like.
I'd note that startup money of the is much harder to get in London, so a US startup might be able to force the idea from experiment to profitability.
This doesn't work in cities. The vast majority of peoples movement are not immediately necessary. They can wait 10-15 minutes (or plan ahead) for efficiency. This also cuts down on costs for everyone.
every 10-15 minutes is cheaper and so because of cost you are often forced to be this bad (or worse) just to be affordable, but it isn't what anyone wants and people who use such systems will dream of ways to make a car work where they are
I would place them in the city centers of major cities, as there should be more than enough potential users.
> They also block people who are trying to cross the street.
Cities could be redesigned by banning cars from their centers, as is already the case in several places around the world.
Outdoor variants don't protect riders from weather, and having to deal with extremes of cold, damp, and heat makes them even less robust.
https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/blog/spiral-escalator-engineering...
Expo: Magic of the White City. the first 10 mins or so are a little corny but it gets better and is super fascinating
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trottoir_roulant_rapide#/media...
which links to https://lccn.loc.gov/00694271 , but that does not seem to have a digital copy available
edit: well here's an archive but it's not any better https://web.archive.org/web/20231016184047if_/http://memory....
7m20s of the same video clip features a clip shot of riders on the overhead converyor/walkway.
[the original film was silent, audio is faked]
> Thomas Edison sent one of his producers, James Henry White, to the Exposition and Mr. White shot at least 16 movies
You've gotta be referring to escalators here. Never seen a moving walkway in a big-box store, or a subway station for that matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_walkway#Trottoir_roulan...
I do think a concept with parallel tracks moving at different speeds would have been easier to use and more reliable though. But it might not have been revolutionary/over-engineered enough to attract attention and subsidies.
Speaking of speed, in the Stockholm main station the escalators go faster than others I've experienced... But I don't know if they've adjusted the speed since my experience years ago.
I have seen some occasionally in stores, in or around Paris. They usually are on an incline to allow trolleys to be taken up or down a level. Or similarly outside malls to get trolleys to the upper level of a car park. That’s in places where you have to stack car parks instead of just having them sprawl all over the place, of course.
> or a subway station for that matter.
There are a few of them in Paris métro stations. Some of them in the London Underground, as well.
Quoting wikipedia:
> The walkway has been the longest continuous moving walkway in the world since its construction in 1961.
I have never seen a flat one in anything else but airports or connections between other mass transit transports such as metros and trains. Definitely not in big box stores as they would be inconvenient and slower than pushing the trolley in the flat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_Hat_Riot for instance
There's lots of pictures of the event if you search
As a bonus, I can imagine myself as Clint Eastwood.
big-box stores? where??
My mental gymnastics is mostly trying to mobilize an entire city with the concept. I see some research suggesting there is lots of room between walking and driving distance. Bringing a bicycle also has its down sides.
Because getting on and off is already so difficult one tends not to notice the other problems with the tech. A simple crossroad is already a problem.
Moving fast is no issue for the more athletic passenger without luggage. It is also the most useless device to them. People with mobility issues don't have to get on but they do have to cross the road.
You would want to slow down or stop the surface, put a fence around it, you would want chairs, a roof would be nice, perhaps walls so that you can further control the climate. And then you have a bus, metro or tram. (haha)
One cool variation (not my idea) was to have a moving platform fromwhich to get in and out of a moving train, tram or metro. You could also make vehicles that connect on the sides. Those would have lots of fragile moving parts and potential dangerous situations if they fail. I see a night train misaligned with the station one time with the last door opening above the entrance of a pedestrian tunnel. A drunk guy almost walked out into the 5 meter drop. That seems preferable over falling between two moving trains.
If he survived that he lived through economic crisis in the twenties and thirties and ultimately WWII including occupation and terror in France.
And ultimately if he got old enough he could have witnessed the early cold war but also European economic bounce back and begining reconciliation between former enemies.
