Anyone have info on how energy-efficient moving walkways are on a person-mile basis? I'm guessing not very, but I'd love to be wrong. Taking a moving walkway instead of a subway would be awesome (assuming you could figure out the speed aspect, obviously).

London had a spiral escalator in 1906, sadly not captured on film

https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/blog/spiral-escalator-engineering...

Filmed by James Henry White. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H._White

Between futurama pneumatic tube, and walkalators, are there any other proposals for infra scale "pedestrian" mobilitiy. Faster/less walking seemed like one of those things futurist urbanists use to waste time speculativing now, now we've settled on escooters and exoskeletons?

During the mid 2000, an experimentation in the Montparnasse metro station in Paris transformed a moving sidewalk in order to have an acceleration ramp from 3 to 9km/h. It was slower(most of the time) than the 1900 expo's 10km/h. And there always was a "slower" sidewalk (3km/h, the default) next to it. The goal was to go up to 11km/h (it did at some point). And yet it failed, and was removed 15 years ago. Only the slow options remain.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trottoir_roulant_rapide#/media...

Asimov describes networks of moving walkways on Earth. There are several adjacent ones with different speeds, and the central one is the fastest. People optimize their journeys by entering the network from the outside and gradually moving to the faster inner beltway. And vice versa when they approach their destination. It's very detailed, quite realistic… and inspiring.

If you like this kind of stuff I highly recommend

Expo: Magic of the White City. the first 10 mins or so are a little corny but it gets better and is super fascinating

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cpOQE5KJJds

As usual, Edison didn't do it himself:

> Thomas Edi­son sent one of his pro­duc­ers, James Hen­ry White, to the Expo­si­tion and Mr. White shot at least 16 movies

Somewhat off-topic, but why are all the men in the film wearing hats? Was this some sort of dress code?

It’s amazing how ideas from over a century ago still feel futuristic today.