Posted Sep 10, 2015, 5:10 PM
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Join Date: Jan 2015
Location: BC
Posts: 4,291
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Design firm proposes replacing London’s Circle line with a giant travelator
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NBBJ, an architecture and design firm based in London, has proposed that London removes the trains from the Underground's Circle line and replaces them with moving walkways. These travelators would move at speeds of up to 15mph (24km/h), which, funnily enough, would actually get you around London faster than the Circle line's rather dismal average speed.
NBBJ's design, which is entirely conceptual at this stage, would pull out the tracks and trains and replace them with three colour-coded (yellow, orange, and red) moving walkways. The yellow lane would start at 3mph, allowing people to get on safely at stations, and then build up to 9mph between stations. Once you're up to speed on the yellow lane, you could switch to either the orange or red walkways, which would move at 12mph and 15mph respectively.
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The topic of urban travelators comes up more regularly than you might think, especially in cities where public transport and good ol' ambulation are the most popular modes of getting from A to B. The rationale is fairly simple: they work quite well in airports, so why not replace some stretches of city pavement, or at least long stretches between subway stations, with moving walkways? In practice, despite various design and architecture firms pitching exciting concepts, it's exceedingly rare to see travelators outside of major transport hubs or convention centres. Paris deployed an experimental high-speed (12km/h) walkway at a Metro subway station in 2002, but it was slowed down to 9km/h after users kept losing their balance, and in 2011 was abandoned entirely.
It's unlikely that the Circle line (or any of the Underground lines) will ever be replaced by a moving walkway; the amount of work required and the disruption caused would be untenable. The more likely scenario for fixing commuter congestion in big cities is the deployment of new transportation systems, such as the rather wonderful Thames Deckway (a proposed pedestrian and cycle route floating on the Thames), or SkyCycle, a network of elevated cycle paths above London's railways.
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http://arstechnica.co.uk/cars/2015/0...nt-travelator/
I can't see moving sidewalks taking hold here anytime soon, but the elevated bike paths look interesting.
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