
People once dreamed of sidewalks that could whisk them across cities. Somehow, that dream ended up at the airport.
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Roman Mars
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Roman Mars
This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. For the most part, I try to spend as little time as possible in airports. They are loud and crowded and littered with the crumbs of way too many blueberry muffins and chicken Caesar wraps. But I will say that I have one very positive airport memory from my childhood. I grew up mostly in Ohio, and every year I would travel by myself to visit my aunt in Memphis, Tennessee. And to get there, I would always fly through Chicago. And at the O' Hare Airport in Terminal 1, there is this tunnel that connects concourses B and C. When I stepped into this tunnel, it was like I entered a wormhole into another universe. I was surrounded on all sides by a mosaic of pulsing neon lights. George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue was playing. It was transportive and calming and I loved it. I think it was one of the first moments in my life where I actively appreciated the design of a space.
Jasper Davidoff
I also have a weirdly meaningful attachment to this tunnel. I was born in Chicago. My family still lives half an hour from o'. Hare.
Roman Mars
That is reporter Jasper Davidoff.
Jasper Davidoff
And for me, what really makes this tunnel of light so special and otherworldly is that as you travel through it, the ground beneath your feet is moving.
All right, here we go.
When you go down the escalator into the tunnel, you step onto a metal conveyor belt. And from there, you float through this mystical, colorful portal on the way to your gate.
And I'm starting to hear the opening sounds of Rhapsody in Blue.
Roman Mars
Oh, my God.
Jasper Davidoff
And the lights, they're just flashing above me.
Even if you've never flown through o', hare, the odds are pretty good that you've experienced this feeling of drifting slowly through a concourse with your suitcase, because the tunnel of light is a dramatic setting for a pretty common piece of airport infrastructure. The moving walkway.
Roman Mars
Moving walkways, or people movers, as they're sometimes called, can be found in most major American airports. And at least in theory, they serve a pretty important function. Moving a bunch of very rushed people very short distances, a little quicker than they can on their own two feet.
Jasper Davidoff
But the thing about moving walkways is that you pretty much only see them at the airport, which got me thinking, like, what is the deal with these things? How did they get to be so ubiquitous in airports and basically nowhere else? And it turns out they were not invented to get you to your plane on time. The moving walkway was originally seen as a form of mass transportation. Over the course of a century, a group of architects and engineers dreamed of turning the sidewalk into a magic carpet that could carry people all throughout the city. And that dream began in New York in the mid-1800s.
Roman Mars
There were basically only two ways to get around Manhattan. You could take a horse drawn carriage, or you could walk.
Jasper Davidoff
The first form of public transportation in New York was called the omnibus. It was a carriage that could fit about 12 people if they squeezed for 12 cents. You could get a bumpy, nauseating ride from one address below 14th street to another address below 14th Street.
Roman Mars
And without any real mass transit, the streets were crowded and chaotic.
Lee Gray
Specifically in New York and other larger cities, There was a recognition that they needed better ways for people to get around.
Jasper Davidoff
This is Lee Gray, an architectural historian and professor emeritus at UNC Charlotte.
Lee Gray
And I am a recognized expert in the history of vertical transportation and occasionally horizontal transportation, if it has, in reference to buildings, so as elevators, escalators, and.
Roman Mars
Moving sidewalks, this is my kind of guy.
Lee Gray
How can I spend an entire academic career studying elevators and, you know, the sort of fascination they hold for me, you know, why do I do this? I don't know.
Jasper Davidoff
Lee says that it was in crowded Manhattan that an inventor had an idea to completely change how people move about the city. His name was Alfred Speer.
Roman Mars
No relation to Nazi architect Albert Speer. No religion.
Jasper Davidoff
Just to clear that up, Alfred Speer.
Is not so infamous.
In fact, he's not very well known at all.
Mark Auerbach
Most people have no clue who he was. If he compiled it together and presented it properly, he could do one hell of an HBO documentary on the man.
Jasper Davidoff
This is Mark Auerbach a local historian from Speer's hometown of Passaic, New Jersey. Mark says that Alfred Speer was a man of many talents. He was a street superintendent, a city planner of sorts of. But he was also a carpenter and an inventor, I guess he liked creating.
Mark Auerbach
Things and making things and always looking at things and how can he improve it? Anything and everything was fair game for him. If he saw a problem and his, you know, his mind was always working, what can he do better?
Jasper Davidoff
Speer's primary job was running a wine.
Business that had a store in lower Manhattan.
And one morning in 1871, he stepped.
Outside of his wine shop and looked at the gobs of people packing the streets.
And he said to himself, we gotta do something about this.
Roman Mars
And so Speer did what he did best. He started tinkering.
Lee Gray
So 1871, Alfred Speer proposed. He called it an endless traveling sidewalk system that would have taken people up and down the length of Broadway, and it would have run above the regular sidewalk. It would have been mounted on sort of stanchions, and you would ascend a. A flight of steps, and you would step onto the moving sidewalk, basically.
Roman Mars
Picture a platform at about the second floor of the nearby buildings with two parallel sidewalks, one fixed and one moving. The moving sidewalk would be 18ft wide and be in constant motion. That way people could step on and off whenever they pleased.
Jasper Davidoff
There would be some benches on there and some awnings for a bit of shelter along the side. There would be drawing rooms and smoking rooms. Every now and then there would be stairs coming up to the moving sidewalk from the street. Or business owners could simply build a bridge from their establishments to the platform.
Lee Gray
Level, and it would take you along. And then you could hop off a light from the moving sidewalk and go in and get a glass of lemonade or coffee or whatever, and then get back on the moving sidewalk. And it was this very easy and elegant way to travel along.
Roman Mars
This was around the same time that the first elevated trains were going up in New York City. And the moving sidewalk was seen as an alternative transit strategy. It would be like the train that never stopped. To quote Speer. It would be an endless train that would appeal to a uniquely American sense of impatience.
Lee Gray
And so that's also the attraction. I don't have to wait. I jump on the moving sidewalk and it takes me there. You could walk down into a station, immediately get on board, and go.
Jasper Davidoff
Speer's plan shifted over the couple years that he developed the idea, but by the time he officially proposed it to the city Of New York. He wanted the sidewalk to be moving at 10 miles an hour.
Roman Mars
That might sound slow compared to a car, but if you think in terms of a treadmill, it's dangerously quick. And so to prevent New Yorkers from falling flat on their face, Speer imagined a whole system of transfer stations, Basically moving platforms that would help pedestrians get.
Jasper Davidoff
Up to speed at 10 miles an hour. Speer calculated his invention would be capable of transporting 18,000 passengers every hour, all day long.
Roman Mars
Speer was insistent that this was the only way to solve the city's congestion problem. In a report he submitted to the state government about the proposal, he wrote, in all caps, it is the solution and the only true solution only of rapid transit. And in 1871, he filed his first two patents for, quote, an endless train for rapid through transit of passengers without stops.
Jasper Davidoff
Influential businessman that he was, Speer managed to get quite far convincing local leaders that a moving sidewalk was the best plan for Manhattan. In fact, he got the New York state legislature to pass two bills supporting the endless train.
Mark Auerbach
Well, yeah, two administrations in a row, 1873, 1874, supported it based upon the fact that he was granted a patent.
Jasper Davidoff
Do you think this is like, people.
Generally would have taken this seriously?
Mark Auerbach
Absolutely. You don't get a patent on something that's whimsical.
Jasper Davidoff
And who knows, maybe Speer's moving sidewalk could have become as integral to Manhattan.
As central park or, I don't know, Times square, Elmo.
But it never got built, because both times, New York governor John Dix vetoed the measures. Reports vary over why, but in addition to the cost, it's said the governor wasn't a big fan of the fact that the sidewalk would be looming over Broadway twice, once in each direction.
Roman Mars
After the veto, Speer mostly gave up on his transportation dreams to focus on his wine business. But his idea of a moving sidewalk was out in the world, and pretty soon, it took on a life of its own.
Jasper Davidoff
In the following decades, there were more moving sidewalk proposals in cities throughout Europe. And then in 1893, at the Chicago world's fair, they actually built one out on a pier into lake Michigan.
Lee Gray
And you paid a fee and you could ride out on the moving sidewalk out in, you know, out at the end of the pier, see the lake, and it would curve around and it would bring you back. So instead of transportation system, it was kind of an amusement ride, sort of.
Jasper Davidoff
But it was the 1900 World's Fair in Paris where Speer's idea was most fully realized.
Erki Hutemo
A pretty amazing technological feat for the Times it was about 4km long, a full circle in the city of Paris, pretty much in the center.
Jasper Davidoff
That's Erki Hutemo, a media archaeologist at ucla, and he says it was called Le Trottoir Roulant, the moving walkway.
Erki Hutemo
Yeah, so the Trottois roulande in Paris was quite a special one. So it was built above the sort of like ground level. And it had two mobile platforms, the high speed one and the sort of like a little bit slower speed one. And then it had stationary platforms. So basically three options.
Jasper Davidoff
This walkway was designed to help people traverse the fairgrounds, connecting the long distances between the pavilions.
Erki Hutemo
So in that sense, I mean, it definitely had a practical function. But very soon it was clear that this was much more than that. It was really an attraction in its own right. So it's something that people had never experienced anywhere.
Roman Mars
Paris's moving walkway was bigger and bolder than anything anyone had seen before. Over the course of about 25 minutes, the walkway would carry passengers through the city center, traversing the footprint of the fair. This was not an amusement park ride relegated to a pier. It was in your face at certain points, quite literally.
Erki Hutemo
In some places the adoretois roulant ran along boulevards and because it was on a higher level, on a platform, so it ended up being in front of people's windows. Some people were really shocked about the idea, thought that their privacy was being basically violated.
Jasper Davidoff
But some forward thinking entrepreneurs tried to take advantage of this new stream of potential customers.
Erki Hutemo
There were stories that for example, the public ladies were selling or trying to sell their services in some of the windows that this platform passed.
Roman Mars
The Trator was something of an engineering marvel. The whole thing ran on electric motors at a time when electric infrastructure was not widespread. So the organizers of the World's Fair had to build their own power station on the grounds and then keep the whole thing running continuously for several months.
Jasper Davidoff
Some of the earliest surviving silent film is of people riding the Paris moving walkway. Thomas Edison's film company was actually there documenting the whole thing. They placed a camera on the walkway and let it roll. Watching the film, you see this mass of wood and electricity gliding through central Paris. You see the ornate apartments and grand festival buildings go by, and you can really imagine the sheer thrill it would have been to take this ride. Especially if it was one of the first times you had experienced electric power. There's one moment when where an older man and woman hop down from the lower speed platform, each grabbing one of the poles that were attached for balance. And the Woman has this goofy little expression on her face like, did I really just get off a sidewalk? Moving two miles an hour.
Roman Mars
The trotto roulant in Paris finally brought Alfred speer's dream to life and showed that it was actually possible to build a moving walkway inside a major city. But it was still a temporary attraction connected to a world's fair. If the technology was going to take off in a meaningful way, there would need to be a permanent walkway that served a practical transportation function.
Jasper Davidoff
And for a second, it looked like a moving walkway might get installed in an extremely practical place. A bridge that connected Brooklyn to Manhattan, One that more than 300,000 people used every day.
Lee Gray
I mean, the Brooklyn bridge, this is, you know, this is one of the most. You know, the minute it's completed, it's one of the most famous bridges in the world.
Jasper Davidoff
In 1902, New York's Commissioner of bridges, Gustav Lindenthal, came up with a plan to build a moving walkway that could whisk commuters over the east river at 10 miles an hour.
Roman Mars
But he didn't get very far. The New York times called the bridge plan magnificently impractical, and government officials couldn't seem to get over the moving walkway's amusement park reputation. But the most powerful argument against this moving walkway was that the Brooklyn bridge already had a train by this point, cable cars had been crossing the bridge for nearly 20 years.
Jasper Davidoff
And as the subway expanded in the early 20th century, it became clear that the train was now New York's transportation mode of choice. Which made people ask, what was the moving sidewalk even for?
Roman Mars
But true believers were undeterred. They kept building demo versions of a moving sidewalk to try and convince skeptical transportation officials.
Lee Gray
What tended to happen at those large models is city officials would show up, they would ride around, they would say, wow, that was really cool. We'll think about this, and then the next day go, you know, we're not really interested. Sorry. It was a pattern. And sometimes they would even be wildly enthusiastic about it. And then when it would come to vote on it, they would just say, well, it's a little. It's a bridge too far. We just can't do it.
Jasper Davidoff
And the dream of turning sidewalks into conveyor belts might have just died there, were it not for a new champion who picked up the baton. Unlike the previous moving walkway supporters, these guys were not motivated by utopian transportation dreams, but instead by the desire to sell a lot of rubber.
Mark Auerbach
Goodyear tires are still our main business, but from the original products have come thousands of new lines, new ways to Serve people.
Roman Mars
During World War II, the Goodyear Tire Company received a bunch of military contracts that allowed them to open new factories across North America. After the war, they started looking to create new ways to sell their product. And one of their ideas was conveyor belts.
Mark Auerbach
These moving belts can do so many useful things. Miles long. They carry great tonnages of bulk materials. Belts can carry people, too, in many ways, many places.
Jasper Davidoff
Goodyear went out looking for places where they could try out their human conveyor belt technology. And eventually, they landed on a train station in Jersey City. There was a long tunnel with a steep grade that riders had to traverse to get to the train.
Lee Gray
And the Stevens Adamson Manufacturing company, in association with Goodyear, built two moving walkways side by side to carry passengers up and down that incline to and from the train. And it was wildly successful.
Roman Mars
Ironically, the moving walkway succeeded not as an alternative to the train, but as a way to make train travel better. The train would get you where you needed to go, but the moving walkway would get you to the train.
Jasper Davidoff
By the 1950s, the dream of an entire city connected by moving sidewalks had gone by the wayside. But letting go of that lofty vision actually allowed the technology to succeed. And the moving walkway started to catch on in smaller settings, like train stations, museums, and stadiums.
Roman Mars
When the Sam Houston Coliseum in Texas was renovated in 1956, it got a moving walkway. When the Travelator Motel opened in San Diego in 1959, the pedestrian bridge built by its owner got a moving walkway. One of the first car washes in California put in a moving walkway so you could glide alongside your car as it got cleaned.
Jasper Davidoff
But the moving walkway ultimately found its perfect use. Case in an up and coming institution. The airport.
Roman Mars
Many of the first modern American airports were built in the 30s and 40s. But with the introduction of airliners and then jet planes like the 707, commercial air travel got exponentially more popular. And by 1950, airlines in the US were carrying 13 times the passengers that they had in 1938. The country's fledgling airports were not prepared for this boom. And very quickly, they needed to expand. And you couldn't stack airplanes vertically.
Jasper Davidoff
So airports sprawled outward, and that meant a lot more walking.
Alistair Gordon
It demanded more of these horizontal kind of connective devices, you know. Yeah, in some cases, there were something like five football fields. You know, I think that's Chicago o'.
Lee Gray
Hare.
Alistair Gordon
You know, if you were unlucky to come in on one, one airline had to shift quickly to another. You know, you had this incredible trek you had to make.
Jasper Davidoff
Alistair Gordon is a journalist and critic whose book Naked Airport chronicles the evolution of aviation infrastructure. He says that o' Hare actually became known as Cardiac Alley because of the epic journey that passengers had to take to get from check in to boarding. This story repeated over and over, and in the span of just a few decades, people began to dread their trips to the airport.
Alistair Gordon
John Updike talks about this rat's passage, you know, from, you know, the parking lot to the actual airplane. Even Kafka wrote about an airport and, you know, kind of was alienated by the whole thing. As you can imagine, Kafka would be. So when you say, you know, airports are Kafka esque, you know, he really actually did go to an airport and have some kind of depressive, you know, moment.
Jasper Davidoff
If only the airlines lamented there were some way to ensure that getting to your plane would not require an interminable uncomfortable slog.
Roman Mars
And this is where the moving walkway, this actually quite old idea, finally met its moment.
Jasper Davidoff
In 1958, the Dallas Love Field Airport installed the very first airport moving walkway.
Lee Gray
That was the installation that captured the imagination of the American public in a profound way. And everybody included photographs of people riding the moving sidewalk, going out to get on a plane.
Roman Mars
The dopey little conveyor belt at Love Field only moved about one and a half miles an hour, but to the public it was just as sexy as cruising at 10,000ft. It was all part of the space age appeal of air travel.
Alistair Gordon
And apparently people would just come and just ride it back and forth. Worth, you know, they weren't going anywhere, but they were. They were fascinated by this futuristic thing.
Jasper Davidoff
Dallas kicked off a trend that other airports were quick to follow. At LAX, where passengers had to walk for 1250ft to get from check into their planes, American Airlines started promoting a campaign to take the walking out of flying.
They put in a moving sidewalk called.
The Astro Way, and they came up with a clever idea to market it. It was a throwback to the famous I Love Lucy scene where Lucy and Ethel are scrambling to deal with a flood of chocolate bon bons rushing to them on a conveyor belt and wrapping them up and shoving them frantically in their mouths.
Ethel, I think this. I think we're fighting a losing game.
They got Lucille Ball herself to come ride the Astroway and show that it was safe and fun.
Alistair Gordon
I got some great publicity photographs from this woman in American Airlines at LAX who had all this incredible material just in her desk. And it was these photographs of Lucille Ball, who'd been hired just to show mainly to show women that you could ride on this Astroway moving sidewalk at lax, that you could, even, even with high heels on, you could ride this thing. And there's a great picture of a stern going saying, look, mom, no hands.
Jasper Davidoff
Beginning in the 60s and 70s, airports all around the country began installing their own moving walkways. The appeal wasn't just to seem snazzy. Wary passengers with heavy bags appreciated the chance to rest their legs. And for people with mobility issues, they were a really useful accommodation. But the walkways also signaled to airport goers that these unpleasant labyrinths were actually modern and efficient. And if there's a single walkway that best represents that idea, it's probably the one at o'. Hare.
Roman Mars
The visionary architect Helmut Jan designed the new united terminal at O' Hare in the mid-80s. The terminal consisted of two long parallel concourses with soaring glass ceilings.
Philip Castillo
You know, this was filled with light. It was this great glass vault. This idea is reminiscent of the great train stations in Europe. You know, this was really a groundbreaking design. No one had seen anything like this before.
Jasper Davidoff
This is Philip Castillo, managing director at Jan's architecture firm. And he says that one thing Jan needed to reckon with was this extremely long tunnel that passengers needed to navigate to get to their gate.
Philip Castillo
They recognized it needed to be something. It cannot just be this 800 foot long tunnel with concrete block walls or tile and a lay in ceiling.
Roman Mars
It needed to be more than that.
Jasper Davidoff
And that is how we got the.
O' Hare Tunnel of light.
A design that turned what could have been a horrible slog into a magic carpet ride that both Roman and I looked forward to as kids. Philip remembers the very first time he walked through the completed tunnel.
Philip Castillo
Thought it was great. I even loved the music. I thought it was really kind of poignant to this kind of idea of how one moves from point A to point B. And I still like it. I still enjoy going down there.
Roman Mars
But the o' Hare Tunnel of light may have been the high point for the moving walkway as a piece of transportation technology, because in recent decades, the peoplemover has gone into decline. Yes, the trippy moving walkway at o' Hare is still there, but it's the only one left in the terminal. In 2015, United ripped out all eight of the other moving walkways. The same thing is happening at a lot of other airports around the country, including Las Vegas, Orlando, Cincinnati, and San Francisco.
Jasper Davidoff
There's a few converging reasons why airports.
Started falling out of love with the moving walkway.
As the equipment got older, repairs became harder and more expensive.
Roman Mars
There's Also a growing acknowledgement that these people movers just don't move people quickly enough. There have been attempts to make them go faster, but faster usually means more trips and falls, and so most of them keep chugging along at a reasonable one to two miles per hour.
Jasper Davidoff
Studies find that using the moving walkway at an airport will get you to your gate a tiny bit faster if there's no one around. But if they get clogged up with pedestrians because people aren't following proper etiquette and standing on the right, they can actually slow you down.
Roman Mars
And we all kind of know this intuitively. If you're late to your flight and you're rushing to make it before the doors close, are you going to risk getting jammed up on the moving walkway or just run for it?
Jasper Davidoff
But fundamentally, I think the biggest reason that we're seeing fewer moving walkways is just that airports have changed.
Roman Mars
With increased security, passengers tend to get to the airport really early and then they are essentially trapped in the terminal with nothing to do. The airport is no longer a place to move through as quickly as possible. It's a place to hang out, like a mall.
Philip Castillo
Airports today, to some extent, they're kind of like shopping centers. You know, you're really a captive audience in there because you're waiting for your plane and you have to do something, so why not shop?
Roman Mars
And you don't really need a moving walkway if you're wandering from the Hudson News to the Starbucks.
Philip Castillo
I think in the last five years they've all been removed because this concept of shopping or eating is much more part of the airport experience.
Jasper Davidoff
But for every critique about how moving walkways are doomed because they're archaic or slow or take up too much space, for me, something else remains true, which is that they rock. They're joyful machines that just for a minute, absorb you into the symphony of moving parts that is our modern world. If you look back at all the moving walkways that were successful throughout history, they succeeded in large part not because they were efficient, but because people genuinely enjoy, enjoyed riding them. So even If I lose 30 seconds taking the moving walkway, you're gonna see me on that thing standing on the right to let the other passengers go by.
Alright, this is the final moving walkway of the journey and I've stepped on the baggage attendants are definitely laughing at me, but that's okay because I'm having a great time, so I'm laughing too.
Mark Auerbach
The moving walkway is now ending.
Roman Mars
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Jasper Davidoff
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Roman Mars
Okay, we are back, and I'm with Jasper Davidoff, who reported that story, and I hear you want to tell me about a piece of moving walkway science fiction.
Jasper Davidoff
Yes. So there was this little bit of moving walkway history that we couldn't quite.
Fit into the piece. And it's this short story from the.
19 fort that is actually about a version of moving walkways that do serve as urban transit. And it's by the author, Robert Heinlein.
Roman Mars
Okay, well, I like his books. I'm unsure about his politics, but I like his books.
Jasper Davidoff
Well, it's actually funny that you say that because we will get to that very much. But we are talking about him because he wrote this short story and it is called the Roads Must Roll.
Roman Mars
Oh, excellent. Yeah, that's an amazing title.
Jasper Davidoff
It is a really solid title. And this story was actually turned into a radio play, so I wanted to bring you a little snippet of that.
Mark Auerbach
Hear the run Watch them run oh, our job is never done for our roadways go rolling along while you ride While you ride we are watching down inside Though your roadways keep rolling along.
Roman Mars
Always high, high Some real theater of the mind radio right there.
Jasper Davidoff
It's very evocative. So the deal with the Roads Must Roll is that it's essentially creating this dystopia set here in the US In a version of the future where cities have been torn apart by the dominance of interstate highways and there's so much automobile traffic that no one can get anywhere and everyone's lives are ruined.
Roman Mars
Impossible.
Jasper Davidoff
Yeah.
Who could imagine this version of the.
Roman Mars
US who can imagine such a world?
Jasper Davidoff
Well, you know, in 1940, this was not quite the level of car brains chaos that the US Would eventually reach. So Heinlein's being a little bit prescient here, but in his version, instead of bowing down to the supremacy of the car, the society and the roads must roll essentially turns to a supercharged version of the moving walkway to get everywhere.
Mark Auerbach
Then the engineers took over. They banned the automobiles, tore up the superhighways, and in their place, they built the rolling road, mechanized roads that moved like huge conveyor belts, whirling along on their giant rotors at speeds ranging from five to 100 miles an hour, carrying the freight, the food and the people from city to city and coast to coast.
Roman Mars
This is very dramatic. 100 miles per hour is a very fast moving walkway. So do you get a sense from this story that Heinlein was in touch with the actual technological developments of real moving walkways around this time?
Jasper Davidoff
Well, it's interesting. I kind of get the sense that he had read up a little bit because his moving roads are structured in kind of a similar way to Alfred Speer's, which is to say they use this series of parallel paths that increase in speed. So you get on the outer one and it's slower and that transitions you. You work your way inward and you get faster and faster. And the other thing that's funny is that in a similar way to these lounges and drawing rooms that Speer thought would be scattered along the route on Broadway, Heinlein places these restaurants and stores directly atop that central express kind of hundred mile an hour lane. And so his vision is you get on there, you start really rocketing to wherever you're going, and you can hang out and kick back and grab a snack or something while you're doing it.
Roman Mars
It's like grabbing a snack from the cart on the bullet train in Japan.
Jasper Davidoff
Yes. No, that's actually a very astute connection. There's actually a character in the story who's visiting the city and he's like, wow, this really feels like, you know, grabbing dinner on a train.
Roman Mars
So where's the dystopia? Like, this sounds, you know, okay with me.
Jasper Davidoff
It does sound good. Unfortunately, some very bad things happen in the Roads must Roll. Some people end up dying because of this conflict between the working engineers that keep the roads running and. And the government that kind of governs them. And so the real question that animates this story is how the power to keep the roads moving and keep society moving is centralized. Because the idea here is that the roads have become a completely essential, non negotiable service. It has to work at all costs or, you know, everything will be snarled up and stop working. And so sort of the protagonist, who's the head of the Sacramento sector of The Roads talks about how the engineers are actually indoctrinated into this military, like, style of hierarchy. They're not allowed to strike. There's no grievances. There's no real critical thinking allowed, even. And so as part of that, the song that you heard earlier, the anthem of the engineers, is actually adapted from the official song of the US army, which is the Army Goes Rolling Along.
Roman Mars
Yeah, yeah, I'm starting to feel the Heinlein in all this. I mean, it's ironic to me to sort of put the idea of the moving walkway into the hands of, like, oppressive state control. Because all the history that, you know, we talked about in the last section, the moving walkway is kind of this whimsical, futuristic world's Fair, you know, getting people over the Brooklyn Bridge in this fun way. And there's Lucille Ball in her high heels. It is not like oppressive state control.
Jasper Davidoff
No. And it's interesting because there is this theme of how at least one author thought about moving walkways in the 40s, but supporters, even at that point, still saw them very differently. They said, these machines are really going to enable freedom. You can get on and off wherever you want. You'll be able to move wherever in the city you want to go.
And actually, I should say we don't.
Quite get to this in the story, but there is still kind of a group of people who believes this. They really still want to create this futuristic vision of a moving walkway as a mass transit solution. One that could really actually take you somewhere at 10 miles an hour.
Roman Mars
I can't believe people are still working on this.
Jasper Davidoff
Yes, they very much are. And so the modern version of this speedy goal is called the accelerated moving walkway. And probably the most famous version of these was actually installed in 2003 at the Montparnasse metro station in Paris. So the situation there was riders had to basically make this 600 foot trek to get between Metro lines, which is a pretty long transfer. And so at one point, the Metro had conventional moving walkways there. They moved under two miles an hour, and that took almost four minutes from end to end. And so the transit agency decided to try and speed things up and create what they called a rapide, where you would have to basically step over these zones and get increasingly faster until you ultimately were moving at seven and a half miles an hour, which is a real clip. But as you might expect, people were not very good at doing this, following the instructions to hold on and go through sort of that transition zone. And also, just like not everyone has the greatest sense of balance, which is a design factor that you definitely need to consider in this kind of thing. So a lot of trips and falls and almost immediately they had to cut the speed and it went down to.
Six miles an hour.
And people kept tripping and falling because that's still really fast. And so before the decade was out, they decommissioned this faster walkway and brought back the conventional ones.
Roman Mars
It totally makes sense to me that it wouldn't work at all. I just know of a few people, many of them are my kids, who would still love a 10 mile an hour conveyor belt. They would do very well with that.
Jasper Davidoff
No, exactly. I mean, like, it is very much a thing that you would like to experience in the world someday, even if it's like not something you're taking every day to get to the train. But I do have good news for your kids and anyone else who has this fantasy, which is that it's still possible. There is specifically a Cincinnati based startup called Beltwayz and these guys claim they are finally going to hit the 10 mile an hour mark.
That's one small step for man and one fast leap for mankind.
We think of them as little Lego pieces and they connect together to form.
A walkway of any length.
And then section by section, we accelerate.
The passenger, accelerate them up to 10 miles per hour.
Roman Mars
I mean, it's amazing to me, the whole pitch sounds exactly like Alfred's spear. It's just like 130 years later.
Jasper Davidoff
It does. We just sort of keep doing this thing over and over again.
Roman Mars
I mean, I just. It fascinates me that this idea will never die. And it also fascinates me that it'll always be futuristic. Like it never stops feeling futuristic. That it felt futuristic in 1900 and it feels futuristic in 2025. That's kind of an amazing quality.
Jasper Davidoff
I mean, it's interesting because you think about how advanced they thought this idea was back in the 1870s, and then 70 years later, it still felt futuristic to have something under your feet that could move. And even now it still feels like this amazing technological leap. I will say of Beltway's, they do say they have a partnership with the Cincinnati airport and they would like to get one of these cooking in there pretty soon. So we will definitely have to keep an eye on that and see if someday there will be a 10 mile an hour conveyor belt for 99 PI listeners to go check out. But, you know, maybe this one does, maybe it doesn't. It feels like no matter what happens, these moving walkway moonshots will just, you know, continue inevitably cycling around over and over and over again. Which is sort of a conveyor belt esque.
Roman Mars
I know that's right. Exactly. The metaphor of like it being always out of reach, like we're always walking towards the goal of a fast, you know, moving walkway and it never gets any closer. It's kind of like walking on our own treadmill. Well, this is really fun stuff, Jasper. Thanks so much for the story and thanks for talking with me.
Jasper Davidoff
Yeah, it's my pleasure.
Roman Mars
99% invisible was produced this week by Jasper Davidoff and edited by Emmett Fitzgerald. Mixed by Martine Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real special thanks this week to Madeline Brozen, Paul Collins, Ricardo Scarinci, William Sproul and Andrew Sparberg. Our executive executive producer is Kathy Tu. Delaney hall is our senior editor. Kurt Kohlsted is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Perube, Jason De Leon, Joe Rosenberg, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Leigh Lachma, Dawn Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina, Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradley, and me, Roman Mars. The 99 Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM podcast family now, headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find us online on all the usual social media spaces as well as our own Discord server. There's a link to that as well as every past episode of 99pi@99pi.org. Do you know Buffalo, New York? Sure, they're famous for their wings. More than that, it's a city with character. Their waterfront is for making waves. You can kayak right through the city and zipline among reimagined grain silos. Buffalo is the kind of city where vintage finds, patio beers and colorful murals all share the same block. You can discover modern masterpieces in a museum that's a work of art and beautifully restored architecture with stories to tell. And if you're the type to ask for directions, be ready. Someone must might just walk you there and point out hidden gems along the way. It's a city where history somehow feels brand new, where your favorite meal might come from a corner bar, and the community. It's tightly knit. But that fabric includes you, too. Now you know. That's Buffalo for you. Learn more@visitbuffalo.com.
Jasper Davidoff
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Roman Mars
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Date: November 18, 2025
Host: Roman Mars
Reporter: Jasper Davidoff
In this episode of 99% Invisible, Roman Mars and reporter Jasper Davidoff explore the curious history and evolution of a ubiquitous but underappreciated piece of airport infrastructure: the moving walkway. Far from being an airport-only oddity, the moving walkway—or "people mover"—was once envisioned as a revolutionary urban transportation solution. The episode traces its origins, cultural significance, and the various attempts (and failures) to reinvent how people move—while also investigating why the moving walkway, once a symbol of the future, is slowly disappearing from airports today. The episode wraps with a foray into science fiction visions of moving walkways and the continuing human fascination with the idea of a true “horizontal elevator.”
"It would be like the train that never stopped. To quote Speer: it would be an endless train that would appeal to a uniquely American sense of impatience."
"It definitely had a practical function. But very soon it was clear that this was much more than that. It was really an attraction in its own right."
"Ironically, the moving walkway succeeded not as an alternative to the train, but as a way to make train travel better. The train would get you where you needed to go, but the moving walkway would get you to the train."
"Apparently people would just come and just ride it back and forth. They weren't going anywhere, but they were fascinated by this futuristic thing."
"For every critique about how moving walkways are doomed because they're archaic or slow or take up too much space, for me, something else remains true, which is that they rock. They're joyful machines..."
"It fascinates me that this idea will never die. And it also fascinates me that it'll always be futuristic...it felt futuristic in 1900 and it feels futuristic in 2025."
"The metaphor of it being always out of reach, like we're always walking towards the goal of a fast, moving walkway and it never gets any closer—it's kind of like walking on our own treadmill."
"When I stepped into this tunnel, it was like I entered a wormhole into another universe."
"You could walk down into a station, immediately get on board, and go."
"Maybe this one does, maybe it doesn't. It feels like no matter what happens, these moving walkway moonshots will just, you know, continue inevitably cycling around over and over and over again. Which is sort of a conveyor belt-esque." – Jasper Davidoff ([42:43])
"The Moving Walkway Is Ending" is a fascinating journey through the aspirations, failures, and lingering allure of the moving walkway, from grand 19th century proposals to their current status as nostalgic airport features—and the recurring hope that one day, the magic carpet will finally move as fast as we wish.