I always wonder what would have happened if humanity had invested in conveyor belts instead of cars and roads for the last 100 years.
I can't shake away the sensation that it could have been a better call.
In Asimov's I Robot books, Earth has a public transport system based on conveyor belts. A 'highway' would have many lanes running next to each other, gradually getting faster as you moved towards the inner lanes.
When I first read that book, I thought it seemed like a lot of wasted space because of the amount of parallel lanes you would need to achieve highway speeds. Then I started driving and noticed how wide our highways already are.
It's not the "I, Robot" books, it's the quadrilogy sometimes called the "Robot" series (confusing, I know). "The Caves of Steel", "The Naked Sun", "Robots of Dawn", "Robots and Empire".
These are without a doubt my favourite of Asimov's books :)
Earth has evolved to a point where the population lives in Cities (capitalisation is important!) -- massive, hundreds of square miles completely enclosed with no outside areas at all. They might as well be space stations.
Transit within these cities takes place on 'strips' for local transport -- think of them as 'lanes' on a freeway. The first strip you step on to is an acceleration strip (onramp), which gets you up to speed to then step onto faster strips.
There's also an "Expressway", which is basically a metro, which you step onto from the fastest strip (I think there is an acceleration strip too) which takes over when you want to go longer distances.
Then for even longer distances you have aircars (planes!).
It's a really good system, but only for highly, highly urbanised areas. I think there's only 2 or 3 cities on the planet at the moment truly dense enough. New York, and perhaps central London.
And in those stories, you can definitely see Asimov's New York City bias. History pointed like an arrow to a future in which cities are...hyper-developed versions of where you grew up and where you prefer to live!
Hmm, are you sure you aren't thinking of the short story "The Roads Must Roll" by Heinlein (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll)? The setup you're describing sounds just like the one in that story.
I don't recall the same setup in the I, Robot stories (but it's been a long time).
I'd like to take a moment to reflect on the fact that within five seconds of reading this comment, Google took me from "Issac Asimov Conveyor belt road" to [1], and a ^F for "Asimov" later I had "The concept of a megalopolis based on high-speed walkways is common in science fiction. The first works set in such a location are "A Story of the Days To Come" (1897) and When The Sleeper Wakes (1899) (also republished as The Sleeper Awakes) written by H. G. Wells, which take place in a future London. Thirty years later, the silent film Metropolis (1927) depicted several scenes showing moving sidewalks and escalators between skyscrapers at high levels. Later, the short story "The Roads Must Roll" (1940), written by Robert A. Heinlein, depicts the risk of a transportation strike in a society based on similar-speed sidewalks. The novel is part of the Future History saga, and takes place in 1976. Isaac Asimov, in the novel The Caves of Steel (1954) and its sequels in the Robot series, uses similar enormous underground cities with a similar sidewalk system. The period described is about the year 3000." [1]
We might not have conveyor belts for roads, but we are defiantly living in the future.
Hmm, funny, I also googled with similar terms, but did not find the Asimov story (which I read when I was a kid). I'm sure you're right, of course -- just amused at my leaky memory.
To your comment, yes, that is pretty amazing, to have my (our) intelligence augmented in this way. Because just writing it down, and reading it once, is not sufficient to remember it.
It took us a long time to understand the power of writing, and it could be that eventual understanding of the power of search will also have vast implications.
I definitely remember there being moving walkways in The Robots of Dawn, one of Asimov's later robot-themed books. I only learned just now that they're all part of one series. I think that's what gizmo686 meant by "I Robot books", as opposed to the individual stories within the original book.
Cablecars are essentially a conveyor-belt form of transport. They require a lot of infrastructure and if there's a breakage, the whole system is down rather than just one piece. They also make noise everywhere, even when there's no traffic in sight.
Then, of course, if your conveyor belt is pedestrian-based, you have exposure to the elements (also meaning limited long-distance travel due to slow speed) and switching between conveyors would be troublesome (particularly if you're inform or have baggage). If you instead ride in some sort of pod, you can up the speed and protect yourself from the elements, but you still need to get it on and off the conveyor belt smoothly; it's be something approaching the complexity of a car anyway. How also would you prioritise/speed up emergency vehicle traffic, which often has to go as quickly as possible?
It's certainly an interesting thought experiment, coming up with the pros and cons.
Cable cars also have the benefit of (effectively) regenerative braking. when your loaded car is going down hill, you're adding energy to the system to help pull another car up. ski lifts too, for that matter.
You assume that there was a call. Modern roads are just a long series of small, natural, incremental progressions on, essentially, a beaten path through the woods. Many of them are probably even in much the same places.
Cars are much the same. First, crude carts, then progressively bigger carts drawn by progressively bigger animals, then someone builds an "artificial animal", put it inside the car and so on.
There has been some non-continuous breaks, the most notable one is the railroad which present a new set of benefits and challenges. The biggest challenge is that railroads require exclusivity in usage (different kinds of road users can share the road, ultimately by temporarily stepping off the road) which is very difficult to allow without central planning. And central planning is really, really difficult.
