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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 City Sections. Another trickle, just as continuous, worked inward from the other side, across the accelerating strips and onto the expressway.

There were the infinite lights: the luminous walls and ceilings that seemed to drip cool, even phosphorescence; the flashing advertisements screaming for attention; the harsh, steady gleam of the “lightworms” that directed THIS WAY TO JERSEY SECTIONS, FOLLOW ARROWS TO EAST RIVER SHUTTLE, UPPER LEVEL FOR ALL WAYS TO LONG ISLAND SECTIONS.

Most of all there was the noise that was inseparable from life: the sound of millions talking, laughing, coughing, calling, humming, breathing.

No directions anywhere to Spacetown, thought Baley.

He stepped from strip to strip with the ease of a lifetime’s practice. Children learned to “hop the strips” as soon as they learned to walk. Baley scarcely felt the jerk of acceleration as his velocity increased with each step. He was not even aware that he leaned forward against the force. In thirty seconds he had reached the final sixty-mile-an-hour strip and could step aboard the railed and glassed-in moving platform that was the expressway.

No directions to Spacetown, he thought.

Vance also had a novel with mechanical roads. I guess that was a common trope back when the first mechanical stairs appeared.

I think the original was supposed to be to the music from "The Caissons Go Rolling Along".

I think about:

https://m.soundcloud.com/thomas-dolby-official/pedestrian-wa...

Larry Niven called them slidewalks and I've always been sorry this terminology never caught on.

so assuming inner sidewalk moving at 100 mph, next outer at 95, and each moving at 5 per less, when big muscular terrorists placed on s-100 carrying a big cardboard box filled with nails and throw it as quickly and hard as possible so that the box of nails open up over s-75 at what velocity are the nails raining down on pedestrians on s-75?

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.

Back in the heyday there was this idea of the arcology where a group of people had it with their government and made their own city-utopia which would rule itself.

Very often in those they featured technology like the staggered automated walkways for transporting people around, etc.

I believe it was H.G. Wells, in his A Story of the Days to Come (1897) and When the Sleeper Wakes (1899).

Not to be grim, but he was the perfect age class to spend 4 years in the trenches...

The French males born in 1894 had a 92% mobilization rate (those who survived infant mortality that was still huge at the time). In 1920, only 48% of this age class was still alive (the big three killer being infant mortality, combat losses and the "Spanish" (Kansas) flu).

See figure 2a in https://shs.cairn.info/revue-population-et-societes-2014-4-p...

There's a German black-and-white comedy "Die Feuerzangenbowle" from 1944 and most of the actors knew this was going to be their last film. They were drafted into the war right after filming wrapped up and all of them died, apart from the main star.

> Every time I watch old films with children in them I always think about how they’ve been dead, hopefully of old age, for a long time already.

I've got movies (black & white, no audio) recorded on a "Pathe-Baby" camera [1] from my grand-mother and her sister, my great-aunt, in the early 1920s, where they're both little girls playing.

I knew them both very well, they lived through WWII in Europe and they both died old. My great-aunt lived until her 100th year.

Very few things are as moving as this little, short Pathe Baby vids I've got of them.

A few years ago we asked a little local shop to convert these to digital format and these files are precious treasure in the family.

[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path%C3%A9-Baby

There even appear to be two guys dressed in uniforms, chivvying kids off the roadway?

Hand-colored, "photochromes". One of them is in Commons category "1900 black and white photographs". Check out "autochromes", though:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Autochromes

Leonid Andreev's moody selfie poses amuse me. (Circa 1910.)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Autochromes_by_L...

If I’m understanding what you’re saying, couldn’t that be solved with some kind of belt tensioner?

> 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.

I would not deny this, and I don't judge people for enjoying to drive. It doesn't prevent me from thinking about alternative worlds / cities though, or in this case, just a stronger focus on establishing public car-based transportation (such as buses), in addition to train lines, which take very long to be built or are currently lacking space to be built altogether, where they would be most needed.

That is stupid. people have places to be. Only a tiny minority are on transit for fun. Everyone else just wants to be there. you do these people a massive disservice by not making their ride efficient.

and the minority who are for the ride will figure out how to make it work.

There is absolutely nothing less pleasing than sitting in traffic in a major North American city with aggressive drivers all around you constantly breaking laws because they think they are more important than everyone else.

In contrast European trains are down right relaxing.

On demand is bad but not for that reason. people have places to be and are bad at planning. You should be running every 5 minutes so even if they are running late it still isn't very long until you get there.

every 10-15 minutes is cheaper and so because of cost you are often forced to be this bad (or worse) just to be affordable, but it isn't what anyone wants and people who use such systems will dream of ways to make a car work where they are

The last US president to wear a Lincoln-style stovepipe hat was ... JFK

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.

Romanticizing horses, specifically, is a very rose colored glasses situation. At the turn of the last century, cities were getting overwhelmed by thousands of tons of horse feces, a similar volume of their urine, and the carcasses of overworked horses dropping dead in the street.

That is looking at the past through rose colored glasses. Walkable cities are too small to have the wealth of options a car (or transit) city does.

trains are nice but cars were faster for most (until congestion - but by then there were so few users that service was bad)

> 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 trams that allowed people to relatively cheaply move around. Technically, horse-driven trams were invented a bit earlier but they never got built at scale.

At 5m39s of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1900_-_The_Paris_Expositi... is a higher quality view of the walkway (plus thirty minutes of other sights to behold from that World's Fair).

7m20s of the same video clip features a clip shot of riders on the overhead converyor/walkway.

[the original film was silent, audio is faked]

Someone else in these comments said s/he wonders what lives the people ended up living who were seen in old photos/videos. Your comment makes me wonder what life this boy (well, he's our senior) lived, and what his impact is beyond being a participant of a curious event in a YouTube video. I guess he had a paper trail, relatives, etc, but there's probably no way to identify him from the present (except if someone's grand-grandkid can give us an anecdote about his grand-grandfather seeing a kid being shoved at the moving walkways in Paris..

Could you ask him, deadbabe?

Which also applies to all history?

That one was in activity about the same period I took the Montparnasse station somewhat regularly, and over those years I couldn't ever take it as it was always either broken or running opposite to my direction.

I do think a concept with parallel tracks moving at different speeds would have been easier to use and more reliable though. But it might not have been revolutionary/over-engineered enough to attract attention and subsidies.

Man, they should've designed it similarly to the video, with parallel tracks with differing speeds. But people's lack of attention would probably lead them to park a foot on each track and causing a tumble.

Speaking of speed, in the Stockholm main station the escalators go faster than others I've experienced... But I don't know if they've adjusted the speed since my experience years ago.

There's one in a Target in the LA area. I forget exactly where it is.

only those that carry the shopping trolleys up/downstairs, designed so the wheels get locked into place.

I have never seen a flat one in anything else but airports or connections between other mass transit transports such as metros and trains. Definitely not in big box stores as they would be inconvenient and slower than pushing the trolley in the flat.