[twelvechairs]

Mid level escalators have a very definite purpose as people wouldn't walk up that steep slope before.

Moving walkways along flat surfaces though? Its very hard to make them attractive. Most people like to walk a little, certainly we are built for it genetically and most people don't walk as much as they should in any case. In terms of mass transit nobody has ever got the safety and space issues to work. They only really have tended to work in airports where there are sometimes very large distances to traverse, and you need an (actually pretty slow moving for safety) solution for the elderly etc. who aren't as mobile. Even at an airport unless distances are massive and people have giant luggage most will prefer to walk, or only take the moving walkway for novelty value.

[iainmerrick]

In airports I’ve been to, most people walk on the moving walkways. Twice as fast!

[mcmoor]

I've been taught that that's what walkways are for. To walk twice as fast!

[soperj]

People would walk more if they could get to where they were going fast. If you could walk to the store as quickly as you could drive, why would you get in the car? No traffic jams on a sidewalk.

[chefandy]

It’s certainly true in NYC. Even if it takes a touch longer than taking the subway, lots of folks walk. If the infrastructure supports it, people will use it.

[palemoonale]

To transport their just-bought stuff?

[chefandy]

In dense cities? Yes. You don’t need a car to transport a load of groceries if there’s a grocery store on the 20 minute walk home from work. For larger trips, backpacks, rolling folding grocery carts, or even wagons do nearly everything a car can do. I used a car sharing service, as needed, for most of my adult life. Having moved to a city with shit for public transit, I miss the hell out of that.

[fragmede]

I think the concept of not doing a months worth of grocery shopping for a family of four at a time is w what's foreign. going to the store for pasta and eggs and toast and nothing more is a waste of a grocery trip in some people's eyes. Those people love to shop at Costco and Sam's, and have a SUV's worth of groceries each time they do a trip. It's not a wrong way to live, but if that's how you live, not driving a vehicle with enough cargo space to hold a large body around means it doesn't make sense how you'd get any groceries. Doing that large a run is exhausting, so you don't do it very often, which means when you do go, you have to do a huge run which makes it suck. Smaller more frequent trips is shorter and mute frequent, which has its own, different problems.

[chefandy]

Agreed. Even then, I used to take the subway to a regional big box wholesale club to grab stuff that made sense. If I lived nearer to a Costco, I’d take advantage of their fantastic sustainable fish program. Lot’s of good quality stuff has a totally worthwhile price point at those places. There’s a lot of room for different approaches, even in dense cities. Most people in cities don’t even have room to store that much stuff. I never did, and I didn’t miss it.

[strken]

I'd never heard of the mid-level escalators before. Apparently they're on a slope with an elevation gain of 135m over 800m, which is pretty serious for someone who's out to do some shopping: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central%E2%80%93Mid-Levels_e...