Image courtesy Fabio Feminò

But how do you get around one of these monster cities?  You can't fly everywhere and the motorways operating at "unprecedented speeds" aren't always feasible.  So, what do you do?  Walk?  Hardly.  Cities would be equipped with sliding pavements that would whisk pedestrians along at up to sixty miles an hour.  Since stepping on a mile-a-minute strip might be, to put it mildly, insanely dangerous, there would be a series of strips travelling at faster and faster speeds to allow you to get on.  Still, you don't have to be a lawyer to imagine all the lovely possibilities for liability and personal damage suits.

Robert Heinlein featured slidewalks in his famous short story The Roads Must Roll in which he outlined a future in which traffic congestion in the mid 20^th century became so bad that the motor cars were supplanted by systems of slidewalks spanning across entire regions like mechanised super highways. 

And how were these slidewalks run?  Why, by a corps of uniformed, gun-toting engineers who handled strikers with a finality that would have warmed Henry Ford's despotic little heart.

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