161–170 of 215 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People were spending much more time outside and the roads were much more dusty. You need a hat to keep yourself from the sun and the dust. Cars made them obsolete.
They also make it way easier to great people even over some distance, without awkwardly moving your hand in the air or shouting and annoying all the others.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People were spending much more time outside and the roads were much more dusty. You need a hat to keep yourself from the sun and the dust. Cars made them obsolete.
They also make it way easier to great people even over some distance, without awkwardly moving your hand in the air or shouting and annoying all the others.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People were spending much more time outside and the roads were much more dusty. You need a hat to keep yourself from the sun and the dust. Cars made them obsolete.
They also make it way easier to great people even over some distance, without awkwardly moving your hand in the air or shouting and annoying all the others.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was a recurring theme throughout most of Golden Age fiction. 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.
People have tried faster moving walkways many times. The problem is getting humans on and off such a system safely in a way that is easy to maintain. 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.
Here at 4:00
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…
This somehow feels like the horizontal equivalent of a Pater Noster elevator. But probably with even worse error modes if it stops working at 100mph.
Does anyone know why we don't have these anymore, except in buildings like airports and shopping malls?
Maybe because in airports people are sometimes required to walk long distances to go from one point to another, while in a city there are public transport, bicycles, taxis, etc. plenty of other options so walking long distances is usually not required.