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"I've taken some stick for passages in Altered Carbon which people complained had sickened them, but then violence should be sickening."
- Richard Morgan

Rolling Road  
  A set of fast-moving strips to move people over distances.  

This idea can now be seen in most major airports; they're called passenger conveyor belts. Heinlein also wrote about a more "pedestrian" version - the slidewalk.

They glided down an electric staircase, and debouched on the walkway which bordered the north-bound five-mile-an-hour strip." Have you ever ridden a conveyor strip before?" Gaines inquired. "It's quite simple. Just remember to face against the motion of the strip as you get on."

They threaded their way through homeward-bound throngs, passing from strip to strip...

After passing through three more wind screens located at the forty, sixty and eighty-mile-an-hour strips, respectively, they finally reached the maximum speed strip, the hundred mile and hour strip, which made the round trip, San Diego to Reno and back, in twelve hours.

Technovelgy from The Roads Must Roll, by Robert Heinlein.
Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1940
Additional resources -

This is probably a Heinlein rediscovery; you can read an earlier version of this concept - the moving roadway from H.G. Wells' 1899 story When the Sleeper Wakes. The first commercial passenger conveyor belt was built in 1954 (by Goodyear for the Hudson and Manhattan railroad).

By the way, the "electric stairway", or escalator, was introduced in 1900.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Roads Must Roll
  More Ideas and Technology by Robert Heinlein
  Tech news articles related to The Roads Must Roll
  Tech news articles related to works by Robert Heinlein

Rolling Road-related news articles:
  - Never-Stop Rail Transit System Proposed

Articles related to Transportation
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