The Moving Walkway is Ending

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 One, 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. 

[TERMINAL AMBIANCE]

JASPER DAVIDOFF: Alright, here we go. 

JASPER DAVIDOFF: 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. 

JASPER DAVIDOFF: And I’m starting to hear the opening sounds of Rhapsody in Blue, oh my god. And the lights–they’re just flashing above me. 

JASPER DAVIDOFF: 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. 

ROMAN MARS: In the mid 1800s, 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 twelve people if they squeezed. For twelve 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 is in reference to buildings, so as elevators, escalators, and moving sidewalks. 

ROMAN MARS: 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? 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–just to clear that up.

JASPER DAVIDOFF: Alfred Speer is not so infamous. In fact, he’s not very well known at all. 

MARK AURBACH: Most people have no clue who he was. If you compile it together and presented it properly, you could do one hell of an HBO documentary on the man. 

JASPER DAVIDOFF: This is Mark Aurbach, 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–but he was also a carpenter and an inventor. 

MARK AURBACH: I guess he liked creating 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, 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 flight of steps and you would step onto the moving sidewalk. 

ROMAN MARS: Basically, 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 18 feet 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 level. 

LEE GRAY: And it would take you along and then you could hop off–alight 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 can 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 up to speed. 

JASPER DAVIDOFF: 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 OF RAPID TRANSIT.” And in 1871, he filed his first two patents for “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 AURBACH: 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, like, people generally would have taken this seriously? 

MARK AURBACH: 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–a 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 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 at the end of the pier–see the lake. And it would curve around, and it would bring you back. So, instead of a 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. 

ERKKI HUHTAMO: A pretty amazing technological feat for the times. So, it was about four kilometers long, a full circle, in the city of Paris, pretty much in the center. 

JASPER DAVIDOFF: That’s Erkki Huhtamo, a media archeologist at UCLA. And he says it was called “le trottoir roulant,” the moving walkway. 

ERKKI HUHTAMO: Yeah, so the trottoir roulant 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 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. 

ERKKI HUHTAMO: 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’ 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. 

ERKKI HUHTAMO: In some places the trottoir roulant ran along boulevards. And because it was on a higher level on a platform, it ended up being in front of people’s windows. Some people were really shocked about the idea and 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. 

ERKKI HUHTAMO: 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 trottoir 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 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 trottoir 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 three hundred thousand people used every day. 

LEE GRAY: I mean, the Brooklyn Bridge–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 ten 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. 

GOODYEAR PROMO: Goodyear. Tires are still our main business. But from the original products have come thousands of new lines–new ways to serve…

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. 

GOODYEAR PROMO: 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 Stephens-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 clean. 

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 U.S. 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. You couldn’t stack airplanes vertically, so airports sprawled outward. 

JASPER DAVIDOFF: And that meant a lot more walking. 

ALASTAIR GORDON: It demanded more of these horizontal kind of connective devices, you know. Yeah, in some cases they were something like five football fields, you know. I think that’s Chicago, O’Hare, you know. If you were unlucky to come in on one airline, had to shift quickly to another, you know, you had this incredible trek you had to make. 

JASPER DAVIDOFF: Alastair 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. 

ALASTAIR GORDON: John Updike talks about this rat’s passage–you know–from the parking lot to the actual airplane. Even Kafka wrote about an airport and 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, he really actually did go to an airport and have some kind of depressive 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. 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 ten thousand feet. 

It was all part of the space age appeal of air travel. 

ALASTAIR GORDON: And 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. 

JASPER DAVIDOFF: Dallas kicked off a trend that other airports were quick to follow. At LAX, where passengers had to walk for 1,250 feet to get from check-in to their planes, American Airlines started promoting a campaign to take the walking out of flying. They put in a moving sidewalk called the Astroway, 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 bonbons rushing to them on a conveyor belt and wrapping them up and shoving them frantically in their mouths. 

LUCY RICARDO: Ethel, I think… I think we’re fighting a losing game…

JASPER DAVIDOFF: They got Lucille Ball herself to come ride the Astroway and show that it was safe and fun. 

ALASTAIR 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 had been hired just to show–mainly to show women–that you could ride on this Astroway moving sidewalk at LAX. Even with high heels on, you could ride this thing. And there’s a great picture of her sort of going, “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 Jahn 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 Jahn’s architecture firm. And he says that one thing Jahn 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. 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: I 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 people mover 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 kinda 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 a 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 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. 

JASPER DAVIDOFF: All right, 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. 

MOVING WALKWAY: The moving walkway is now ending. Please, look down. 

ROMAN MARS: Coming up after the break, we’ve got some moving walkway science fiction… 

[AD BREAK] 

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 1940s 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: It’s actually funny that you say that because we will get to that very much. 

ROMAN MARS: Okay. 

JASPER DAVIDOFF: But we are talking about him because he wrote this short story, and it is called The Roads Must Roll. 

ROMAN MARS: Oh, excellent. 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. 

THE ROADS MUST ROLL: Hear them run, watch them run, oh, our job is never done / For our roadways go rolling along. / While you ride, while you ride, we are working down inside / So your roadways keep rolling along…

ROMAN MARS: It’s 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 U.S. in a version of the future where cities have been torn apart by, you know, 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: [CHUCKLING] Impossible! 

JASPER DAVIDOFF: Yeah, who could imagine this version of the U.S.? 

ROMAN MARS: Who can imagine such a world? 

JASPER DAVIDOFF: Well, you know, in 1940, this was not quite the level of car-brained chaos that the U.S. 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 in The Roads Must Roll essentially turns to a supercharged version of the moving walkway to get everywhere. 

THE ROADS MUST ROLL: Then the engineers took over. They banned the automobiles, tore up the superhighways, and in their place they built the rolling roads–mechanized roads that moved like huge conveyor belts, twirling along on their giant rotors at speeds ranging from five to one hundred 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. One hundred 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, like, 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 know, 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 grabbing dinner on a train.”

ROMAN MARS: So, where’s the dystopia? Like, this sounds 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 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 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 U.S. Army, which is The Army Goes Rolling Along. 

ROMAN MARS: I’m starting to feel the Heinlein in all this now. 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 we talked about in the last section. The moving walkway is kind of this whimsical, futuristic, world’s fair getting people over the Brooklyn Bridge in this fun way and Lucille Ball on 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. [LAUGHS]

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 “troittoir roulant 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. 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 ten mile an hour conveyor belt. Like ,they would do very well with that. 

JASPER DAVIDOFF: It is very much a thing that you would like to experience in the world someday, even if it’s 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 Beltways, and these guys claim they are finally going to hit the 10-mile-an-hour mark. 

ANDREW ROWAN: That’s one small step for man, and one fast leap for mankind. 

JOHN YUKSEL: 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. 

JOHN YUKSEL: Accelerate them up to ten miles per hour…

ROMAN MARS: I mean, it’s amazing to me. The whole pitch sounds exactly like Alfred Speer. 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, it fascinates me that this idea will never die. 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 beltways, 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 99PI 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 continue, inevitably cycling around over and over and over again, which is sort of a conveyor belt-esque quality. 

ROMAN MARS: If know! That’s right. Exactly. 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–is 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 Martín Gonzalez, music by Swan Real. 

Special thanks this week to Madeline Brozen, Paul Collins, Riccardo Scarinci, William Sproule, and Andrew Sparberg.

Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Joe Rosenberg, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Kelly Prime, Jeyca 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, at 99pi.org.