Moving walkway
roughly horizontal conveyor for pedestrians
A moving walkway – also known as an autowalk, moving pavement, moving sidewalk, movator, travolator, or travelator – is a slow-moving conveyor mechanism that transports people across a horizontal or inclined plane over a short to medium distance. They can be used by standing on them or walking on them, allowing users to cover that distance with less effort and/or more speed than by walking. They are commonly installed in pairs to provide transport in each direction. They are typically designed similarly to escalators and share much of the same underlying technology.
History
The first moving walkway debuted at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, Illinois, in the United States as The Great Wharf Moving Sidewalk. Designed by architect Joseph Lyman Silsbee, it had two sections: one where passengers were seated, and one where they could stand or walk. It ran in a loop down the length of a lakefront pier to a casino.
Six years later, another moving walkway was presented to the public at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris as the Rue de l'Avenir. It consisted of three elevated platforms—the first stationary, the second moving at a moderate speed, and the third moving at about ten kilometers per hour (six miles per hour). These demonstrations likely inspired some of H. G. Wells' settings mentioned in the "Science Fiction" section below.
The public source identifies “Moving walkway” as roughly horizontal conveyor for pedestrians. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Moving, walkway and roughly.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q847580. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1893 and 1900.
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This entry incorporates text from “Moving walkway” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.