10 Mph Moving Sidewalks Could Make Crosstown Buses Obsolete (opens in new tab)

You have to dig up and destroy hundreds of miles of walkways.

You have to replace brick, concrete and tiles with hundreds of miles of very, very expensive electromechanical technology.

You have to do this in TWO directions.

You have to hire thousands of workers, technicians and engineers.

You have to fund the development of the technology because it doesn't exist for this application.

You have to provide power, lighting, etc.

If this is in snow country, you have to provide a small army of snow removal trucks and crews to keep the darn things clean. Even then you'll still pay to move tons of snow, which won't be cheap.

You'll have to widen sidewalks in lots of places in order to accommodate all forms of traffic and work around existing infrastructure (subway station entrances?).

You'll have to have medical services available because you will have people getting hurt as they fall off the thing and do stupid stuff at 10 miles per hour.

Liability is likely to be huge.

And, of course, there is no practical way to charge for usage so we are probably going to sock everyone with yet more taxes to build yet another bullshit project nobody is going to use.

If the context is to replace "crosstown buses" you are talking about tens to hundreds of miles of sidewalks and all of the organization, infrastructure, cost and support to take something simple (buses and bus routes) and turn it into something complex, pointless, questionable and unlikely to really work.

The cost of such a ridiculous system would be staggering. Not sure why anyone who reads HN would need this spelled out.

For example, compare these two options:

Option 1: Take 10 or 20 bus routes. Each being 5 to 10 miles long. Convert all buses to electric power.

Option 2: Take the same routes. Rip-up 200 miles of sidewalk (yeah, they'll be some overlap, this is just a quick mental exercise). Develop new technology. Install 400 miles of it (you need two directions of travel). Staff for installation, support, etc.

The first passes "physics" in that asking "does it make sense given all we know?" test results in a pretty quick "yes!". The second is such an obscene deviation from what would make sense from almost any perspective that it is surprising anyone would consider discussing it at all.

Take, for example, having 400 miles of active sidewalks. You just replaced a few buses with 400 miles of sidewalk moving most of the time. Why would anyone wait if the sidewalk is right there. Whereas before people would wait a few minutes for a ride now you are going to have dozens of miles of expensive power-consuming active sidewalks moving all the time simply to carry a single person 100 meters to then have them cross the street and get on the next active sidewalk. And, if it snows, now you are carrying tons of snow until you devote a small army of trucks to go clean the snow. I mean, the more you think about the reality of this utopic concept the stupider it sounds.

It'd probably make far more sense to have a small fleet of electric scooters available for rent and use only along a predetermined route. If you get off that route they turn off. So now, you'd have small one or two person clean scooters distributed along a 5 to 10 mile route for anyone to hop on and off as needed. At most you might have to walk a block or two to get one. This isn't an idea that I thought through. I'm just pulling it out of a hat to illustrate that the "physics" of this off-the-cuff concept would make far more sense than ripping-up hundreds of miles of sidewalk to install a monster of a system that makes less than zero sense.

The "does it pass physics" test refers to stuff that just doesn't make sense. Like a miracle, or the earth being 6,000 years old, or buying a supercomputer to do basic math or commuting in a Humvee. In other words, there are things that defy reasonable reality to such an extent that they simply don't make sense.

Waiting for a bus usually means waiting outdoors. There are tons of reasons why bus stops are no fun at all.

There is evidence of this still embedded in the pavement of cities which have, or used to have, above-ground trolley systems.