Wiktionary
n. (context science fiction English) A moving pavement / sidewalk
Wikipedia
A slidewalk is a fictional moving sidewalk structurally sound enough to support buildings and large populations of travelers. Adjacent slidewalks moving at different rates could let travelers accelerate to great speeds.
They were imagined by science fiction writer H. G. Wells in When the Sleeper Wakes. Robert A. Heinlein made them the instruments of social upheaval in the 1940 short story The Roads Must Roll. Isaac Asimov, in his Robot series, imagined slidewalks as the potential method of transportation of practically the entire urban population on Earth, with expressways moving at up to equipped with seating accommodations for long distance travel, and with slower subsidiary tracks branching off from the main lines. Arthur C. Clarke also used them in The City and the Stars. Larry Niven used them in Ringworld and Flatlander. Slidewalks figure prominently in the animated series " The Jetsons".
The term is also used colloquially for a conventional moving walkway.
Usage examples of "slidewalk".
Steel Butterfly, as the slidewalk took them past a trio of boutiques, an antique shop, and a brokerage house.
Mandelbrot was already back on the moving slidewalk, keeping as many of the Hunters in sight as long as he could.
He shook his head as the Hunters turned and started for the nearest slidewalk, pulling them along in their inflexible grips.
The Hunters turned to ride the slidewalks and Derec found himself facing Ariel.
The truck stopped several times to pick up other Hunters from the slidewalks.
A few more robots appeared, riding the slidewalks along the side of the boulevard.
They ran for a block, switched slidewalks athletically, and ran again, looking over their shoulders.
There was a strip of parquet flooring some sixty feet wide running down the entire length of it, which in turn was flanked by two slidewalks that slowly moved past the shops.
The sisters lost sight of it until Alema found the right scanner, and by then it was padding down the main boulevard as though it had been riding slidewalks all its life.
In addition to a dozen different species of slave residents, the artificial city contained turbolifts, slidewalks, even droid-operated hovercars.
The slidewalks were no longer functional, and he began walking along the parquet flooring that ran down the middle of the Mall.
He had to switch from moving slidewalk to high-speed elevator in a plaza that fronted on the entertainment district, and as he crossed the plaza his eye was caught by a glowing red sign a hundred meters or so down the mall: Contrat Rouge.
From all corners of the quadrangle, the slidewalks carried Earthworms in their green uniforms, upper-class cadets in deep blue, enlisted spacemen in scarlet red, and Solar Guard officers in their striking uniforms of black and gold.
Panting heavily, she turned and ran for the slidewalk, angling toward a likely intersection point with it as it rolled along the moving slidewalk.
The shift workers howled and laughed and were pelted, and broke ranks, and the jelly beans managed to work their way into the mechanism of the slidewalks after which there was a hideous scraping as the sound of a million fingernails rasp down a quarter of a million blackboards, followed by a coughing and a sputtering, and then the slidewalks all stopped and everyone was summarily dumped thisawayandthataway in a jackstraw tumble, still laughing and popping little jelly bean eggs of childish color into their mouths.