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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."
When it gets up to a certain speed, the wind resistance against your body will be greater than the friction of the belt against your feet, and you will cease to move forward...
As mentioned in the article, the most difficult issue is the transition from moving on the walkway and moving on stationary ground.
It seems to me the best solution to this is to have "lanes" in the walkway. The far left lane would move at the maximum speed, whereas successive lanes to the right would be decelerated. When exits were reached, you could easily step to the right to get to a lower speed; the transition between 9km/h and 6km/h is still a transition, but its less than 9km/h to 0km/h.
"Stumble before you crawl"
It would seem to me that the sheer number of moving parts in a kilometre or so of walkway must make the chances of frequent failures pretty high compared to other public transport methods. How fault-tolerant is it? Any French Slashdotters able to answer?
Would be interesting to see some schematics.
Thanks for reminding me of the title.
What I remember of the story was that they had this rolling road that spanned the USA from east to west, with lanes that went faster and faster. You got on the first slow speed lane, and just walked over to successively faster lanes. The fastest lane was some cool 1950's velocity like 150-300mph.
Some disgruntled workers clipped a lane or two, with expected results.
Nice to see Robert Heinlein's idea making it to reality, now if I could only speak Basic with someone on the moon, or have a farm on Ganymede!
If you got a $100 bill, put your hands up...
better would be organic, something like stomach cillia, where the floor doesn't move the length of the journey, but little tiny bits from in place do- not my idea, something I read once.
the individual elements take turns dropping, moving a tiny bit, pushing up again, and moving you a tiny bit... done repeatedly= ya move down the floor- which doesn't move.
less to break down, and spilled drinks and food (as long as they aren't too hot) are actually welcome...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
As an idea, these expressways are a fairly good way of transporting humans. They travel at constant speed, so there should be no obvious difference to the traveller, no matter what the speed is. Of course, in reailty we'd experience air resistence; try sticking your head out of the window on a car going at 70mph. but there may be some way of reducing this in enclosed tunnels, like blowing air at the same velocity as the floor is moving.
In Asimov's vision (I think), the different-speed strips were parallel to each other, not serial like this French version. This meant that you's step to the side to go onto a faster strip, and keep going until you hit the fastest one, which could be several hundred miles an hour. As the differential in speed between the strip you are on and those near is never more than about 1mph, you won't do yourself any serious damage by falling over. see diagram:
---->---7mph->--
---->---8mph->--
---->---9mph->--
etc.
This structure makes them easier to 'network'. The only danger, I suppose, is if a strip breaks then the speed-differential between it and then next one could be massive.
I suppose any serious implementation would use some kind of semiconductor thang to decrease friction, and on a wide scale could be very energy efficient. These things are probably more useful to society than a Segway, but you'd have to design a city around them from the ground up, so I doubt they'll change the way we live just yet.
These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined. -- Homer Simpson