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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...
by Heinlein was one of the first ScFi stories I ever read!
Glad to see it coming to fruition!
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
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 ...
Imagine getting a pants leg caught in one of these people gobblers.
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"
Am I the only one who would be embarrassed to use this simply by virtue of its name?
"How are you getting there?"
"Oh, I'm taking the travelator."
"...."
The coolest voice ever.
I read this this morning on the BBC and immediately booked a weekend in Paris for myself and my beloved - hey its summer, the flights were under 200 sterling return and I cant wait to see her fall on her arse as we get on this thing!
I'm just hoping they dont stop you taking skateboards onto this thing!
What an accomplishment!
Did they smash a bottle of cheap Champagne over it to dedicate it?
US personal injury lawyers are already lobbying to bring this to the USA.
This one goes about three to four times as fast as a normal one does. It has acceleration and decelleration zones at the beginning and end, as it would be far too fast to get on otherwise.
----
"The real problem nowadays is how to move crowds; they can travel fast over long distances with the TGV (high-speed train) or airplanes, but not over short distances (under 1km)," he says.
---
How about good ol' walking ?!
Say, whats the bandwidth of one of these if you can stack boxes of DVD-RW on one end and take them off the other.
Julian.
He's been sent back through time on a mission: to move between different locations!
Arnold Schwarzenegger is... "The Travelator".
Jurisprudence Fetishist Gets Off On A Technicality --theonion.com
And what about moving WiFi hotspots?
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Today: The introduction of the travelator eliminates the need for walking.
10 years: Our legs become strange, archaic appendages that surgeons will handily remove for a small fee.
100 years: Our brains float around in little hovering domes.
I want a cobalt blue dome.
The coolest voice ever.
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.
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.
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
...And it's located in the tunnels beneath the Geneve airport. They've got a system like this there, but I'm not sure they run it at the same speed. At least I didn't think it was moving that fast when I used it. Quite fun, atually.
I also use a similar thing in a local supermarket. All you'd have to do is crank up the speed on it to equal the Paris one, but then again, it's slighly elevated and I don't think people like being catapulted from the 2nd floor...
Is this a reinvention of the wheel (Kakakaka! Transportation!) or did I miss something? Prolly the latter, so please releive me of my blissful ignorance.
All rites reversed 2010
Teavelators, escalators, revolving doors, they seem natural and intuitive to those who are used to them.
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
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
When I first read "already as fast as a bus" I envisioned this thing cranking along at 30mph, people hanging on for dear life with the wind blowing their hair back. 9 km/h is a decent jogging pace, so maybe they are referring to the average speed of a bus in Paris. I am unimpressed.
Besides, in the first month they are going to have at least one old lady fall on the exit rollers with her gigantic suitcase and 40 other people will be force-fed into the melee to create a giant writhing heap.
All it will take is one idiot and his lawyer to mess it up for everyone else.
Have you seen my stapler?
This is a neat thing. I guess they're using it or have at least tried it out at a few other places around the world.
I had read in a newspaper report some months back that authorities in Mumbai, India were planning to install this kind of 'travelator' to link two of the most important railway stations in Mumbai, Churchgate and CST. But I don't remember seeing any action on it since then.
Btw, I would like to advise the travelator operators in Paris to hand out barf bags to people travelling on these contraptions. *heh*
We have few traditions on SlashDot and you are stepping on the most sacred.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Wow! After I say goodbye to the wife Jane, my boy Elroy, daughter Jane, and pat Astro on the head, I can hop on one of these babies and start another productive day at Spacely Sprockets. Ain't the future grand?
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.
I live in Paris and tried it a while ago. It works like a charm. The acceleration and deceleration are surprisingly smooth provided you keep your feets on the ground. Then it is exactly like a normal conveyor mat. I like it and I see no drawbacks.
http://rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0, 1299,DRMN_15_2087992,00.html
;~)
z isco. htm
_ lospel ambres.htm
As usual, some people just can't seem to get along.
Personally, I think more could be done with this concept. If the center, fastest "strip" was a sit down type one, wouldn't this really be nothing more than a permanently available, perpetual people bus. Think about it, moving McDonalds, talk about fast food!
As well, these conveyers could easily be constructed as subways. I can also see these being used at large exhibitions, galleries, parks and muesums.
Other conveyers of note:
Zizco, world's longest single flight horizontal curve conveyor
(15.6 km)
www.conveyor-dynamics.com/projects/popup/fs_
Los Pelambres, world's largest downhill conveyor system
(3 conveyors, 12.7 km, 1296 m drop, 8700 tph)
www.conveyor-dynamics.com/projects/popup/fs
Words to men, as air to birds.
They're not a bunch of cheapskates! They used the printer ink; naturally.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Why don't they use something like a maglevel/chairlift. On which individual carriages are propelled (at any acceleration you like :-) down a track that doesn't have the limitation of being flat and straight.
My spelling isn't bad, I'm evolving the language
R. A. Heinlein, _The Roads Must Roll_
And it was a 5 MPH difference between lanes. Every lane has to have separate motors, etc, so you don't want too many of them. 5 MPH is a brisk walk so it's not hard to move from one to the next.
No! I thought, uh, I thought I'd chauffeur myself this evening. Yes, that's what I thought. How difficult could it be? I'm sure the manual will indicate which lever is the velocitator and which the deceleratrix, hmm?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
A basic invention i just came up with is not dissimilar to a train - you get into a box that has rollers/wheels on the bottom. Internal friction in the wheels/rollers will accelerate the box on the conveyor belt and the box can then be accelerated to whatever speed wanted (extremely fast if in a vacuum). The same effect will slow the box down when it comes off the other end.
Boxes can then be sent back using a travellator that goes the other way, or another idea is to make them collapsible so they can go back under the conveyor belt.
The next question is how to design slip roads and junctions so we can build a whole network of the things.
A sliproad is pretty easy - you just have another conveyor belt going the same speed next to the one you already have and you cross over (either in the box, or in the pedestrian version).
Junctions could be nasty due to the concept of traffic jams. The whole thing would have to be computer controlled with each box knowing its route through the traffic so that traffic jams couldn't happen.
Here's the really cool (and tricky) part: then you put the motors inside the platforms themselves. Then you don't need miles long rubber belts that can wear out. Just replace them with concrete floors. And to keep people from falling out, add walls. If you add a roof, you can operate them outside, even when it's raining! And for more capacity (to make up for having the seats in the first place), you can use more than one platform stacked together.
I think it would look something like this.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
[sarcasim]
How can this even get off the ground if future cities are designed around the Segway AKA Ginger? Ginger is the future "Human Transporter" . Ginger is "IT" !. Steve Jobs told me so! There's no place for something like this.
[/sarcasim]
Seriously though, I think the *real* future is in hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (whether they be private cars or public buses) for three reasons. First, that's where all the serious R&D money is going right now. Secondly, they require no great leap of concept and will be more psychologically acceptable to the public (i.e. its just a car with a different engine as opposed to something strange and possibly "dangerous"). Third, other than adding hyrdogen pumps to existing gas stations, they requie no expesive and massive public works project because they can use the current road infrastructure. The gas station problem can be handled by a government regulation on the lines of "if you run a gas station and have more than two pumps, at least one has to be for hydrogen".
Now if they could jack up a fuel cell powerful enough for a jet engine capable of inter-city/cross-country transport, we'd be set.
Where do you want to be dragged by the balls today?
I read that as a part of the rest of the post at first, and wondered if that was how those roads worked...
Just put a sign up that says you are using it at youre own risk and that the elderly, women and other idiots should just walk. Of course there should be a normal walkway to the side (if for no other reason then to allow maintenance)
My fists start to itch when I read that stupid womans remark about her mother being scared. You don't have to fucking use it. I am tired of having the world fit itself to the lowest common denominator. This is a nice idea wich could solve some basic problems in large public areas like airports. Stupid people will always be falling over. Don't let the stupid people rule our lives.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Ahh but that's where you are wrong. This is a new business model of getting people to their computers/internet connection faster. That way they can buy stuff from your website (i.e. amazon.com) much more often. If you can move the people 50 times faster than they can walk, you can increase your profits by a factor of 50 (well not really but it's good enough for the patent office). And, of course, if someone walks on the Amazon.com travelator to get to a computer to order off of BarnesandNoble.com, it is a DMCA violation.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
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.
Actually, this significantly predates Asimov and Heinlein in SciFi. It goes back to HG Wells, and When the Sleeper Wakes, which I highly recommend.
r wa kes/5/
He described not only airplanes, televisions and moving pedestrian roadways, but much of the modern way of life before it existed.
http://www.online-literature.com/wellshg/sleepe
If each strip is only 10 feet wide, and goes up 5 mph each strip...you just know you'd have kids running the 50 yard dash sideways, occasionally causing major accidents.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
If its like the ones at american airports such as detroit, and there are walls on the side that are not moving. I guarentee that eventually your going to run across someone who's foot catches the wall and moving at that speed however fast, is going to break the guys ankle slaming him face first into the crack between the wall and the belt grinding his nose off like a belt-sander.
Seems like the French aren't afraid to try techno-miracles -- I haven't seen any metro system as good -- London is close, but alot of inconsistencies. In Paris and France, they aren't afraid to try new things (and the US still
doesn't have any high-speed trains....bunch of cowards -- look big behind
their high-tech weapons -- but when it comes to something socially useful...
forget it. It was a shame the French became the only company to provide
Super-Sonic speeds on jets -- and, of course, what did we do in the US?
We banned their use in US airspace because Elmer's cow might stop producing
milk from the occasional bang. Big woop. We could have had coast-to-coast
in 2-3 hours, but noooOOOOOooo.... any real R&D goes to defense where
they don't have to worry about every soldier who breaks a nail suing them.
Americans are just so damn stupid so often....that and greedy. Grrr.
Why can't the US every take the lead in these areas --- because it's always
private development and unless the private developer can prove profit (minus
real or bogus lawsuits) before it is even tested, it falls dead on the design
floor.
I really thought the Casino bosses in Las Vegas just might pull off the
high speed train idea to L.A. But it's been ages since I heard that idea
float.
Everyone in the US seems to want to have the right to stop progress that can benefit large numbers of people -- like all the poltics with the "Rich"
who can buy their congressmen in Menlo Park/Palo Alto and don't want BART
to go through their town -- we were promised it would circle he Bay and have
been paying sales tax to support it since...when, 1970's? Everything
is politics and self-interest.
Grrrrrr.
There has been one of these at the Spadina subway station in Toronto for years. It works pretty well. They use it between two sections of perpendicular subway tunnel that are extraordinarily far apart. After living in Toronto for 8 years, I would say that the escalators and the moving sidewalk are out of order roughly 30% of the time. They're great when they work, but I have to question the cost affectiveness.