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Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)

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Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)

#151

Post by lbreakjai »

bluGill wrote: post #80
cogman10 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Walkable cities are too small to have the wealth of options a car (or transit) city does. 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…

That depends on what you are looking for. There are plenty of shops for the common needs - but if you want an odd niche no small walkable area can support it. How many magic stories can your city support? Even something like a guitar shop need a very dense area for people who live in walking distance to be enough to support it. I can think of dozens of other niches - many smaller the above examples.

I live in a city of about 160k inhabitants. I live about 2 kilometers away from the hypercenter. A half-hour walk, which I wouldn't consider "walking distance".

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.

Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)

#152

Post by philipallstar »

delichon wrote: post #130
tangus wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody carries a gun in Heinlein stories, so those terrorists will be quickly dealt with by armed citizens, thus confirming the superiority of Libertarianism.

In 1940 when he wrote this Heinlein was a New Deal Democrat supporter of Franklin Roosevelt. He was an active progressive who had recently worked on Upton Sinclair’s socialist “End Poverty in California” campaign. His libertarian shift was twenty years in the future, in his fifties.

Those people were "everyone's self-sufficient, so only a few people down on their luck need the state" folk. They didn't realise that loads of people wouldn't be like that if they didn't have to be.

Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)

#153

Post by moritzwarhier »

bluGill wrote: post #55
moritzwarhier wrote: post #32

Modern urban car infrastructure is neither space- nor energy-efficient, but urban planning is long-term, and decisions shift all efficiency considerations in the long-term in a way that's hard to undo. 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…

On demand is bad! People have places to be and they need to be able to depend on arriving on time. on demand means they can't be sure when the transport will detour to pick someone else up thus making them late. what we need are reliable fixed routes that are predictable. making on denand reliable means that there are more vehicles driving around than we now have cars - as empty vehicles reposition just in case someo…

> 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.

Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)

#154

Post by donkey_brains »

lloeki wrote: post #142
mikkupikku wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asimov went into some detail with this premise too, in Caves of Steel iirc. I suppose he probably got it from Heinlein.

Caves of Steel indeed (I seem to recall a more elaborate section but can't find it again): 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…

Harlan Ellison also referred to “slidewalks”. They form a major plot point in “Repent, Harlequin! Said The Ticktockman”, in which the Harlequin at one point dumps millions of jellybeans on the slidewalk, jamming it and making workers late for their shift.

Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)

#155

Post by pasc1878 »

wordpad wrote: post #90
cogman10 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Romanticizing horses, specifically, is a very rose colored glasses situation. 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 f…

Rail can't take you to suburbs is basically the main reason this happened.

Look at South London - train to suburbs is normal

Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)

#157

Post by pasc1878 »

cyberax wrote: post #62
cogman10 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars really messed a lot of that up. 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 a…

> 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. 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 tra…

In London trains came in 30-40 years before electric trams. So trains were the driving force.

See the Underground for an example.

Might even be 70 years see the London-Greenwich railway for the first instance.

Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)

#158

Post by ludicrousdispla »

delichon wrote: post #3

I'd guess that Heinlein was aware of it and scaled it up in his imagination. 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 f…

They have an inner and outer set of moving sidewalks as the loading area for one of the Harry Potter Universal Orlando rides (the one in Hogwart's Castle.) It's extremely disorienting at first but they have lots of staff moving people into the seats, so no one ends up hitting the walls.

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.

Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)

#159

Post by natmaka »

brohee wrote: post #123
swores wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The too-fast one in Paris was 12km/h, not 4km/h which would be OK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_walkway#Trottoir_roulan...

I took it many times, it didn't feel particularly dangerous but you had to pay more attention than on a regular moving walkway. What ultimately killed it was reliability, availability was too low. With more deployed I guess the kinks would have slowly disappeared, but the market just doesn't seem to be there.

Maybe because they began to iron out problems and saw the TCO rise too much.

Re: Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)

#160

Post by stateofinquiry »

joshdavham wrote: post #95

Somewhat off-topic, but why are all the men in the film wearing hats? Was this some sort of dress code?

If you are interested in this topic, especially from the US perspective, I recommend this book: https://www.alibris.com/Hatless-Jack-The-President-the-Fedor... . There was apparently significant social pressure for all men to wear hats until the mid C 20th.
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