From Alfred Speer's 10 mph vision in 1871 to modern failures in Paris, the moving walkway has failed as mass transit because of the fundamental physics problem of safely onboarding people onto a platform already moving at high speed, leading to trips and falls.
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After failing as a city-wide transit solution, the moving walkway found its perfect product-market fit in airports, solving the specific pain point of long treks through ever-expanding terminals created by the jet age.
After proving its robo-taxis are 90% safer than human drivers, Waymo is now making them more "confidently assertive" to better navigate real-world traffic. This counter-intuitive shift from passive safety to calculated aggression is a necessary step to improve efficiency and reduce delays, highlighting the trade-offs required for autonomous vehicle integration.
The moving walkway’s popular debut at World's Fairs typecast it as an amusement ride, creating a "magnificently impractical" reputation that prevented government officials from taking it seriously for major urban infrastructure projects like the Brooklyn Bridge.
The NFL's potential European expansion via supersonic jets mirrors baseball's history. The Dodgers and Giants only moved from New York to California once commercial air travel made cross-country trips practical. This reveals a recurring pattern where transportation breakthroughs are the critical catalyst for unlocking bi-coastal or intercontinental sports markets.
While often no faster than walking, iconic moving walkways like Chicago O'Hare's succeed by transforming a tedious journey into a "transportive and calming" experience. This demonstrates the high value of experiential design in otherwise utilitarian public infrastructure.
Current self-driving technology cannot solve the complex, unpredictable situations human drivers navigate daily. This is not a problem that more data or better algorithms can fix, but a fundamental limitation. According to the 'Journey of the Mind' theory, full autonomy will only be possible when vehicles can incorporate the actual mechanism of consciousness.
The decline of moving walkways isn't just about cost or inefficiency. Airports now function like malls, where the business model relies on passengers lingering and spending money, making rapid transit through corridors counterproductive.
After failing to compete with trains, the moving walkway's first successful permanent installation was in a Jersey City train station. It proved its value not as a primary transit mode but as a micro-mobility tool to enhance an existing system by solving the 'last 100 yards' problem.
Regulating technology based on anticipating *potential* future harms, rather than known ones, is a dangerous path. This 'precautionary principle,' common in Europe, stifles breakthrough innovation. If applied historically, it would have blocked transformative technologies like the automobile or even nuclear power, which has a better safety record than oil.
Self-driving cars, a 20-year journey so far, are relatively simple robots: metal boxes on 2D surfaces designed *not* to touch things. General-purpose robots operate in complex 3D environments with the primary goal of *touching* and manipulating objects. This highlights the immense, often underestimated, physical and algorithmic challenges facing robotics.
