Hold on! Beltways are putting the world’s fastest travelator on trial
With the aim of transforming how we navigate large airports, can this high-speed model truly take off?
The moving walkway has long been a fringe fascination in the world of mobility. Science-fiction writers from Isaac Asimov to Robert A Heinlein imagined future cities bristling with speedy pedestrian conveyors but the technology hasn’t quite lived up to its potential. Now a US start-up called Beltways hopes to change this. In early 2026 the firm will hold a public trial at Cincinnati & Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG) to deploy what it claims will be the world’s fastest moving walkway, capable of whisking standing users at a top speed of 16km/h. (Current travelators putter along at a maximum of 3km/h.)
“Transit is only useful if it’s faster than walking,” says John Yuksel, who co-founded Beltways with his brother, Matine, and envisions his “accelerator” walkways as a last-mile system pulsing through places such as New York’s Times Square. The siblings left jobs in Silicon Valley to start the company and are bringing to fruition an idea first envisioned by their father, Edip, when he was an engineering student at Turkey’s METU university. Edip drew up plans for a modular walkway system that could cut through traffic-choked Istanbul. Previous attempts at faster walkways – the trottoir roulant deployed by Paris’s metro agency more than 20 years ago or Thyssenkrupp’s Accel system, used in Toronto’s Pearson Airport – ultimately ran aground, largely due to mechanical and financial problems.
The first moving walkway was set up at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, then a revised version by the same architect, Joseph Lyman Silsbee, featured at Paris’s Exposition Universelle in 1900. More than a century later, the “street of the future” might be about to arrive, and quicker, than you think.
Comment
Moving walkways can make urban spaces more walkable, efficient and sustainable. We’d be delighted to hop on.
