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High Speed Travelator
Anonymous Award writes "Remember those old Isaac Asimov tales of cities of the future, where everybody walked along on moving sidewalks, sometimes clear across a country? Today's airport travelators have always been disappointingly pale imitations of these, but now in
Paris we may be seeing the
true birth of this wonderfully dangerous mode of mass transportation. Its
already as fast as a bus, but when they can crank them up to motorway speeds...
well, lets just say this may have a better chance of having cities designed
around it than certain other recent innovations."
See also The Roads Must Roll; Robert Heinlein's book based upon moving roads and what happens when the guys who maintain them go on strike ...
I went Paris for the weekend in March and we went through Montparnasse one day and went on this travelator.
They have guys watching to stop certain people getting on, I have heard they have had to pay out for injuries to some people.
First it accelerates you to 9kph then it is exactly like a normal travelator only much faster.
I loved it.
The only problems are the acceleration and deceleration phases. It's very bumpy. You have to hold on to the rail. If they can fix those aspects these things will start appearing in airports everywhere.
If you ask me, this was a much better design than the neck-breaking jallopy installed in Montparnasse Station...
They also experimented some 30 years ago with one that was shaped like an integral sign; instead of a rubber plate, there were solid plates which slide sideways at the end, effectively yielding a slower speed but without the jarring hells-on-wheels acceleration.
>>It seems to me the best solution to this is to have "lanes" in the walkway.
In fact, this is exactly what they have in Paris. The high-speed travelator was put in between two other standard moving walkways. One of the standard walkways goes in the opposite direction, and the other lets you move along at 3km/h. So pedestrians do have a choice between the 9km/h lane, the 3km/h lane, or the "old fashioned" 0km/h walkway.
The only thing I don't like about the highspeed walkway is the fact that it is only running during the workday, Mon-Fri. There were enough people who were falling on it that they had to employ people to stand at both ends of the thing to make sure that users don't hurt themselves...
tom
The Loderway Accelerating Walkway, circa 1998, used multiple belts at different speeds. The transitions between belts involved a 5mm drop and small-diameter end rollers, instead of a transition plate. That was probably the simplest solution to the problem. Two systems were installed in Australia, field tests were claimed to be successful, but the manufacturer no longer seems to be around.
NKK (yes, the zipper company) and Mitsubishi have both built prototype "accelerating moving walkways", but neither system seems to have been installed more than once. NKK's system involves expansible plate-type steps that become longer in the high-speed section. The Mitsubishi system works by turning a corner, so that a series of short wide plates transform into a series of long narrow plates. Both of these systems avoid difficult transition points, but are complicated and expensive throughout the whole length of the system. The Loderway and Paris systems have transitions, which adds risk, but the long section is just a plain belt, so the cost of long systems is manageable.