Moving walkway
[7] Six years later, another moving walkway was presented to the public at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris as the Rue de l'Avenir.
[11] In 1961, Jim Downer designed and had produced by Dunlop, the first flat running 'Travelator' for a BBC exhibition in Charing Cross underground station.
[13] It was in fact an invention by Gabriel Bouladon and Paul Zuppiger of the Battelle Memorial Institute at their former Geneva, Switzerland facility.
A prototype was built and demonstrated at the Battelle Institute in Geneva in the early 1970s, as can be attested by a (French-speaking) Swiss television program entitled Un Jour une Heure aired in October 1974.
After a short distance the tread plates were accelerated to one side, sliding past one another to form progressively into a narrower but faster-moving track which travelled at almost a right angle to the entry section.
Another attempt at an accelerated walkway in the 1980s was the TRAX (Trottoir Roulant Accéléré), which was developed by Dassault and RATP and whose prototype was installed at Invalides station in Paris.
Trial systems were installed at Flinders Street railway station in Melbourne and Brisbane Airport Australia.
In 2002, CNIM designed and installed the experimental, 185-metre (607 ft) trottoir roulant rapide high-speed walkway in the Montparnasse–Bienvenüe station in France.
[citation needed] The walkway's pallet-type design accelerates and decelerates users in a manner that eliminates many of the safety risks generated by the moving belt-type used in Paris, making it suitable for use by people of all ages and sizes regardless of their health condition.
Conflicting sources name either Goodyear Tire or Canadian elevator company Turnbull as the inventor of the inclined moving walkway.
Walmart in Canada require users of wheelchairs and other mobility aids to be accompanied by shop staff when using their moving walkways, which they refer to as 'movators'.
[20] Similar to museums, some zoological park exhibits have a moving walkway to ease guests through an animal display or habitat.
An aquarium at the Mall of America does this with a moving walkway made up of specially rounded pallets that enable it to change directions en route.
In the UK, inclined travelators are used in stores, including Asda, B&M Bargains, IKEA, Marks & Spencer, Morrisons, Sainsbury's, and Tesco.
[22][23] In the United States, inclined walkways can be found in certain IKEA, Menards, Publix, H-E-B, Wegmans, Costco Wholesale, and Whole Foods Market stores.
Thirty years later, the silent film Metropolis (1927) depicted several scenes showing moving sidewalks and escalators between skyscrapers at high levels.
Later, the short story "The Roads Must Roll" (1940), written by Robert A. Heinlein, depicts the risk of a transportation strike in a society based on similar-speed sidewalks.
In the Heinlein work the fast lane runs at 100 mph (160 km/h), and the first "mechanical road" was built in 1960 between Cincinnati and Cleveland.
In the novel, Clarke writes, An engineer of the ancient world would have gone slowly mad trying to understand how a solid roadway could be fixed at both ends while its centre travelled at a hundred miles an hour...
The fact that he was in reality travelling up a vertical shaft thousands of feet deep gave Alvin no sense of insecurity, for a failure of the polarizing field was unthinkable.In his non-fiction book Profiles of the Future, Arthur C. Clarke mentions moving sidewalks but made of some sort of anisotropic material that could flow in the direction of travel but hold the weight of a person.
In the Strugatsky brothers' Noon Universe, the worldwide network of moving roads is one of the first megaprojects undertaken on newly united Earth, before the advent of FTL starships and its consequences turned everybody's attention to the stars.
These roads there are quasiliving organisms similar to Clarke's description and were used for both local commuting and long-distance non-urgent transport until their use was eclipsed by an instant teleportation network.
A slidewalk is a fictional moving pavement structurally sound enough to support buildings and large populations of travelers.
Isaac Asimov, in his Robot series, imagined slidewalks as the potential method of transportation of practically the entire urban population on Earth, with expressways moving at up to 95 km/h (60 mph) equipped with seating accommodations for long-distance travel, and with slower subsidiary tracks branching off from the main lines.
