The easy way to get around at the 1900 Exposition Universelle (Image: London Stereoscopic Company/Getty) Ambitious plans for the New York walkways (Image: AllwaysNY.com/The Passaic Public Library)

When Paris hosted the Exposition Universelle in 1900, it unveiled its vision for the future of transport. Below ground, the city’s stylish new Metro made its debut, while above ground was something more avant garde. The trottoir roulant was a moving walkway that circled the fair in a 3-kilometre loop, its articulated wooden segments “gliding around like a wooden serpent with its tail in its mouth”, according to one reporter. Nearly 7 million visitors hopped on. A few even brought folding chairs, which proved useful when one woman gave birth in transit. Her child was promptly christened Trottoir Roulant Benost. A new kind of traveller had been born.

BY 1902, New Yorkers had finally had enough of the rush-hour crush on the Brooklyn Bridge. Mass transit lines converged at both sides of the East river, disgorging thousands of travellers onto already packed streetcars or teeming sidewalks. It was a “daily torture”, wrote one disgruntled commuter. For Bridge Commissioner Gustav Lindenthal there was an obvious solution: a high-speed moving walkway across the bridge.

The first moving walkway had been unveiled eight years earlier at the Chicago World’s Fair and had proved a huge success at subsequent expositions in Berlin and Paris. Chicago’s walkway, the brainchild of engineer Max Schmidt, consisted of three rings, the first stationary, the second moving at 4 kilometres per hour and the third at 8 km/h, an arrangement that allowed walkers to adjust to each speed before moving to …