The Moving Walkway Is Ending

0:00This 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 1, 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.

0:44I 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. 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. That is reporter 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. All right, here we go.

1:29When 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. 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.

1:54Even 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. 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. But the thing about moving walkways is that you pretty much only see them at the airport.

2:35Which 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. 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.

3:17The first form of public transportation in New York was called the omnibus. It was a carriage that could fit about 12 people if they squeezed. For 12 cents, you could get a bumpy, nauseating ride from one address below 14th Street to another address below 14th Street. And without any real mass transit, the streets were crowded and chaotic. Specifically in New York and other larger cities, there was a recognition that they needed better ways for people to get around. This is Lee Gray, an architectural historian and professor emeritus at UNC Charlotte. And I am a recognized expert in the history of vertical transportation and occasionally horizontal transportation if it has in reference to buildings.

4:02So elevators, escalators, and moving sidewalks. This is my kind of guy. How can I spend an entire academic career studying elevators and, you know, the sort of fascination they hold for me? You know, why do I do this? I don't know. 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. No relation to Nazi architect Albert Speer, just to clear that up. Alfred Speer is not so infamous. In fact, he's not very well known at all. 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.

4:49This is Mark Auerbach, 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. 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 and his mind was always working, what can he do better? Spears' 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.

5:31And he said to himself, we got to do something about this. And so Speer did what he did best. He started tinkering. 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. 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.

6:16That way people could step on and off whenever they pleased. 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. And it would take you along, and then you could hop off a light 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.

6:52This 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 Spear, it would be an endless train that would appeal to a uniquely American sense of impatience. 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. Spears' plan shifted over the couple of 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.

7:33That 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. At 10 miles an hour, Speer calculated his invention would be capable of transporting 18 ,000 passengers every hour, all day long. 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.

8:15And in 1871, he filed his first two patents for, quote, An endless train for rapid through transit of passengers without stops. 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. Well, yeah, two administrations in a row, 1873, 1874, supported it based upon the fact that he was granted a patent. Do you think this is like people generally would have taken this seriously? Absolutely. You don't get a patent on something that's whimsical.

8:57call? And who knows, maybe Spears Moving Sidewalk could have become as integral to Manhattan as Central Park or, I don't know, 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's said the governor wasn't a big fan of the fact that the sidewalk would be looming over Broadway twice, once in each direction. 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.

9:39In 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. 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. But it was the 1900 World's Fair in Paris where Speer's idea was most fully realized. A pretty amazing technological feat for the time. So it was about four kilometers long, a full circle in the city of Paris, pretty much in the center.

10:26That's Erky Hotemo, a media archaeologist at UCLA. And he says it was called Le Trottoir Roulant, the moving walkway. 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 sort of like a little bit slower speed one. And then it had stationary platforms. So basically three options. This walkway was designed to help people traverse the fairgrounds, connecting the long distances between the pavilions. 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.

11:14It was really an attraction in its own right. So it's something that people had never experienced anywhere. Paris's 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. In some places, the trottoir roulant ran along boulevards. And because it was on a higher level on a platform, so it ended up being in front of people's windows.

11:57Some people were really shocked about the idea, thought that their privacy was being basically like violated. But some forward-thinking entrepreneurs tried to take advantage of this new stream of potential customers. 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. 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.

12:45Some 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.

13:32And the woman has this goofy little expression on her face, like, did I really just get off a sidewalk moving two miles an hour? The Chateau Roulon in Paris finally brought Alfred Spears' 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. And for a second, it looked like a moving walkway might get installed in an extremely practical place.

14:13A bridge that connected Brooklyn to Manhattan. One that more than 300 ,000 people used every day. I mean, the Brooklyn Bridge. This is, you know, this is one of the most, you know, The minute it's completed, it's one of the most famous bridges in the world. In 1902, New York's commissioner of bridges, Gustav Lundenthal, came up with a plan to build a moving walkway that could whisk commuters over the East River at 10 miles an hour. 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.

14:51But 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. 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? But true believers were undeterred. Deterred, they kept building demo versions of a moving sidewalk to try and convince skeptical transportation officials. 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.

15:33We'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 bridge too far, we just can't do it. 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.

16:12Tires are still our main business, but from the original products have come thousands of new lines, new ways to serve people. 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. 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. 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.

17:04There was a long tunnel with a steep grade that riders had to traverse to get to the train. And the Stevens-Adamsen 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. 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. By the 1950s, the dream of an entire city connected by moving sidewalks had gone by the wayside.

17:47But 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. 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 cleaned. But the moving walkway ultimately found its perfect use case in an up-and-coming institution, the airport.

18:31Many 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. And that meant a lot more walking. It demanded more of these horizontal kind of connective devices, you know. Yeah, in some cases, they were at something like five football fields, you know.

19:17I 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. Alistair 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. John Updike talks about this rat's passage, you know, from, you know, the parking lot to the actual airplane.

20:01Even Kafka wrote about an airport and, you know, kind of was alienated by the whole thing. As you can imagine, Kafka would be. So when you say, you know, airports are Kafkaesque, you know, he really actually did go to an airport and have some kind of depressive, you know, moment. If only, the airlines lamented, there were some way to ensure that getting to your plane would not require an interminable, uncomfortable slog. And this is where the moving walkway, this actually quite old idea, finally met its moment. In 1958, the Dallas Love Field Airport installed the very first airport moving walkway.

20:42That 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. 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 10 ,000 feet. It was all part of the space age appeal of air travel. And apparently people would just come and just ride it back and forth, you know. They weren't going anywhere, but they were fascinated by this futuristic thing. Dallas kicked off a trend that other airports were quick to follow.

21:25At 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. Ethel, I think this is...

22:01I think we're fighting a losing game!

22:07They got Lucille Ball herself to come ride the Astroway, and show that it was safe and fun. 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, you moving sidewalk at LAX, that you could even with high heels on, you could ride this thing. And there's a great picture of a student going saying, look mom no hands. Beginning in the 60s and 70s, airports all around the country began installing their own moving walkways.

22:49The appeal wasn't just to seem snazzy. Weary 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. The visionary architect Helmut Yon designed the new United Terminal at O 'Hare in the mid-80s. The terminal consisted of two long parallel concourses with soaring glass ceilings. You know, this was filled with light.

23:29It 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. This is Philip Castillo, managing director at Jan's architecture firm. And he says that one thing Jan needed to reckon with was this extremely long tunnel that passengers needed to navigate to get to their gate. 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. 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.

24:22Philip remembers the very first time he walked through the completed tunnel. I thought it was great. I even love 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. 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.

25:02The same thing is happening at a lot of other airports around the country, including Las Vegas, Orlando, Cincinnati, and San Francisco. 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. 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. 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.

25:45But 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. And we all kind of 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? But fundamentally, I think the biggest reason that we're seeing fewer moving walkways is just that airports have changed. With increased security, passengers tend to get to the airport really early. And then they're essentially trapped in the terminal with nothing to do.

26:22the airport is no longer a place to move through as quickly as possible. It's a place to hang out, like a mall. 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? And you don't really need a moving walkway if you're wandering from the Hudson News to the Starbucks. I think in the last five years, they've all been removed because this concept of shopping or eating is much more part of the airport experience. 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.

27:12they'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 writing 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. 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.