Product Code Database
A moving walkway – also known as an autowalk,Used by Kone; moving pavement, moving sidewalk, travolator,
This has become a genericized trademark of Otis Worldwide mainly in the UK
Six years later, another moving walkway was presented to the public at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris as the Rue de l'Avenir. It consisted of three elevated platforms—the first stationary, the second moving at a moderate speed, and the third moving at about . These demonstrations likely inspired some of H. G. Wells' settings mentioned in the "Science Fiction" section below.
The Beeler Organization, a New York City consulting firm, proposed a Continuous Transit System with Sub-Surface Moving Platforms for Atlanta in 1924, with a design roughly similar to the Paris Exposition system. The proposed drive system used a linear induction motor. The system was not constructed.
The Speedwalk, the first commercial moving walkway in the United States was installed in 1954 in Jersey City, New Jersey, inside the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad Erie station at the Pavonia Terminal. Built by Goodyear, it was long and moved up a 10% grade at ."Passenger Conveyor Belt to be Installed in Erie Station", New York Times, 1953, October 6 It was removed a few years later when traffic patterns at the station changed.
The first moving walkway in an airport was installed in 1958 at Love Field in Dallas, Texas. On January 1, 1960, Tina Marie Brandon, age 2, was killed on the moving sidewalk.
Moving walkways generally move at a slower speed than a natural walking pace, and when people step onto one, they tend to slow their pace to compensate; thus moving walkways only minimally improve travel times and overall transport capacity.
Both types of moving walkway have a grooved surface to mesh with combplates at the ends. Also, nearly all moving walkways are built with moving handrails similar to those on escalators.Otis Elevator Company, "NCT Trav-O-Lator Moving Walk," Farmington, CT, 2000: 1.
In the 1970s, Dunlop Rubber developed the Speedaway system. It was in fact an invention by Gabriel Bouladon and Paul Zuppiger of the Battelle Memorial Institute at their former Geneva, Switzerland facility. A prototype was built and demonstrated at the Battelle Institute in Geneva in the early 1970s, as can be attested by a (French-speaking) Swiss television program entitled Un Jour une Heure aired in October 1974. The great advantage of the Speedaway, as compared to the then existing systems, was that the embarking/disembarking zone was both wide and slow-moving (up to four passengers could embark simultaneously, equating to around 10,000 per hour), whereas the transportation zone was narrower and fast-moving.
The entrance to the system was like a very wide escalator, with broad metal tread plates of a parallelogram shape. After a short distance the tread plates were accelerated to one side, sliding past one another to form progressively into a narrower but faster-moving track which travelled at almost a right angle to the entry section. The passenger was accelerated through a parabolic path to a maximum design speed . The experience was unfamiliar to passengers, who needed to understand how to use the system to be able to do so safely. Developing a moving hand-rail for the system presented a challenge, also solved by the Battelle team. The Speedaway was intended to be used as a stand-alone system over short distances or to form acceleration and deceleration units providing entry and exit means for a parallel conventional (but fast-running) Starglide walkway which covered longer distances. The system was still in development in 1975 but never went into commercial production.
Another attempt at an accelerated walkway in the 1980s was the TRAX ( Trottoir Roulant Accéléré), which was developed by Dassault and RATP Group and whose prototype was installed at Invalides station in Paris. The speed at entry and exit was , while the maximum speed was . It was a technical failure due to its complexity, and was never commercially exploited.
In the mid-1990s, the Loderway Moving Walkway company patented and licensed a design to a number of larger moving walkway manufacturers. Trial systems were installed at Flinders Street railway station in Melbourne and Brisbane Airport Australia. These met with a positive response from the public, but no permanent installations were made. This system is of the belt type, with a sequence of belts moving at different speeds to accelerate and decelerate riders. A sequence of different speed handrails is also used.
Using this walkway is similar to using any other moving walkway, except that there are special procedures to follow when entering or exiting at either end. On entering, there is a acceleration zone where the "ground" is a series of metal rollers. Riders stand still with both feet on these rollers and use one hand to hold the handrail and let it pull them so that they glide over the rollers. The idea is to accelerate the riders so that they will be traveling fast enough to step onto the moving walkway belt. Riders who try to walk on these rollers are at significant risk of falling over. Once on the walkway, riders can stand or walk as on an ordinary moving walkway. At the exit, the same technique is used to decelerate the riders. Users step onto a series of rollers which decelerate them slowly, rather than the abrupt halt which would otherwise take place.
The walkway proved to be unreliable, leading to many users losing their balance and having accidents. Consequently, it was removed by RATP Group in 2011 after nine years in service, being replaced with a standard moving walkway.
The walkway's pallet-type design accelerates and decelerates users in a manner that eliminates many of the safety risks generated by the moving belt-type used in Paris, making it suitable for use by people of all ages and sizes regardless of their health condition. The pallets "intermesh" with a comb and slot arrangement. They expand out of each other when speeding up, and compress into each other when slowing down. The handrails work in a similar manner, and because of this, there is no need to hold the handrails when entering or exiting the walkway. It moves at roughly when riders step onto it and speeds up to approximately , which it remains at until near the end, where it slows back down.
ThyssenKrupp continued development of that product, and the result is Accel, an upgraded version of Express Walkway, offering speeds of up to , which is faster than of Express Walkway, and is the same speed as of original version of TRR walkway.
Some instead use shopping cart conveyors to transport passengers and their carts between store levels simultaneously. Walmart in Canada require users of wheelchairs and other mobility aids to be accompanied by shop staff when using their moving walkways, which they refer to as 'movators'. This policy has been superseded in some stores by the installation of elevators.
Shopping carts used on inclined moving walkways usually have wheels specially designed to get caught in the grooves of the walkway's tread when rolled onto the walkway, thereby preventing the cart from rolling down. The wheels are lifted off the tread by the landing plate at the end.
Of particular note is the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, France, which has several moving walkways inside a series of futuristic suspended tubes.
A moving walkway was formerly part of the complex in Spadina Toronto subway in Toronto, Canada. Installed in 1978, it reduced the travel time needed to transfer between the platforms on the Bloor–Danforth and the Yonge–University–Spadina lines. They were removed in 2004 and patrons are now required to walk between the stations.
The 1975–76 American Freedom Train did this with a moving walkway inside each successive railroad car, thus maximizing the number of people who could view the interior exhibits in the limited time the train was stopped in each town.
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, US, uses a moving walkway to connect the two main buildings.
The Tower of London in London, England, uses a moving walkway where visitors are passing the cabinets which contain the Crown Jewels.
In the United States, inclined walkways can be found in certain IKEA, Menards, Publix, H-E-B, Wegmans, Costco, and Whole Foods Market stores.
In each of these cases, there is a massive network of parallel moving belts, the inner ones moving faster. Passengers are screened from wind, and there are chairs and even shops on the belt. In the Heinlein work the fast lane runs at , and the first "mechanical road" was built in 1960 between Cincinnati and Cleveland. The relative speed of two adjacent belts is Heinlein, Robert A., "The Roads Must Roll," in Healy, Raymond J. and J. Francis McComas, ed., Famous Science Fiction Stories: Adventures in Time and Space, 2nd ed. New York, Random House, 1957. (in the book, the fast lane stops while the second lane keeps running at ). In the Wells and Asimov works there are more steps in the speed scale and the speeds are less extreme.
In Arthur C. Clarke's novel, Against the Fall of Night (later rewritten as The City and the Stars) the Megacity of Diaspar is interwoven with "moving ways" which, unlike Heinlein's conveyor belts, are solid floors that can mysteriously move as a fluid. In the novel, Clarke writes, In his non-fiction book Profiles of the Future, Arthur C. Clarke mentions moving sidewalks but made of some sort of Anisotropy that could flow in the direction of travel but hold the weight of a person. The fluid would have the advantage of offering a continuous gradient of speed from the edge to edge so there would be no jumps, and simply moving from side to side would effect a change in speed.
In the Strugatsky brothers' Noon Universe, the worldwide network of moving roads is one of the first undertaken on newly united Earth, before the advent of FTL starships and its consequences turned everybody's attention to the stars. These roads there are quasiliving organisms similar to Clarke's description and were used for both local commuting and long-distance non-urgent transport until their use was eclipsed by an instant teleportation network.
The animated TV series The Jetsons depicts moving walkways everywhere, even in private homes.
They were imagined by science fiction writer H. G. Wells in When the Sleeper Wakes. Robert A. Heinlein made them the instruments of social upheaval in the 1940 short story The Roads Must Roll. Isaac Asimov, in his Robot series, imagined slidewalks as the potential method of transportation of practically the entire urban population on Earth, with expressways moving at up to equipped with seating accommodations for long-distance travel, and with slower subsidiary tracks branching off from the main lines. Arthur C. Clarke also used them in The City and the Stars. Larry Niven used them in Ringworld and Flatlander. Slidewalks figure prominently in The Jetsons.
|
|
