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Comment by mc | Hacker News Reader

Human travel.

You know those moving walkways (Trav O lators?) that they have in airports to speed up travelers?

I'd place those everywhere.

Want to go to the grocery store? Walk there in 5 minutes. Living in LA and need to visit SF for the weekend? Get off your ass and walk there.

The thing that bugs me most about cars, in addition to wasting gas, is that they're isolating devices. They prevent me from admiring scenery, meeting interesting people, and walking more often.

(This idea is more a revolution than a reinvention.)

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Living in LA and need to visit SF for the weekend? Get off your ass and walk there.

Umm...what? Are these moving sidewalks going to travel at 50mph?

The thing that bugs me most about cars, in addition to wasting gas, is that they're isolating devices. They prevent me from admiring scenery, meeting interesting people, and walking more often.

Suggestion: ride the train. You can talk to people, admire the scenery, and walk around.

I somehow think of the 'expressways' or whatever Isaac calls them in his book 'The Caves of Steel'. Basically just what you described, I think.

(They're some kind of walk-escalators that stretch all around towns, cross towns, cross land. Which you move onto the slower one, escalate your speed for the next strip, jump over to the next strip, etc. )

Want to go to the grocery store? Walk there in 5 minutes.

It's called a bicycle.

(It also makes it significantly easier to bring 50 pounds of groceries home; saving you from having walk there before every meal.)

It's called a bicycle

No, it's called elimination of zoning laws.

This seems to be a problem with the suburbs. If you want to live within walking distance to the grocery store, move to somewhere within walking distance of the grocery store. I can walk to three (different chains), and take the L to one more. (I still take my bike, though, much easier!)

I agree. If you get a chance, James Howard Kunstler's "The Geography of Nowhere" is an interesting read about this and other travesties of modern architecture and infrastructure.

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