1.    
We start this weekend with a health and security warning for all of our UK readers venturing out for a last blast of summer sunshine, for our Canadian and US audience gearing up for Labo(u)r Day weekend, for children of all shapes and sizes and adults hovering around five feet in height. For the past three years I’ve been monitoring the arrival of robot floor cleaners at airports, rail stations, office concourses and shopping malls around the world. I’ve been paying particularly close attention to their recent arrival at Zürich Airport and how they manage to interact with the waves of arrivals and departures. While I’ve yet to spot any head-on collisions, there are certainly plenty of near misses and much dodging and weaving as these robots have a tendency to make abrupt stops and spins. But this is not the problem. Far from it. The real danger is considerably more menacing than a simple scrape with an automated vacuum cleaner – pint-sized families could soon be consumed by rapidly mutating clusters of MDBs (monster dust bunnies). 

The MDB, closely related to the more harmless domestic variety, can grow out of nowhere, multiply at speed and becomes a threat one to two weeks after a facility manager at a global transport hub lays off 25 cleaning staff and replaces them with a few robots. If David Attenborough isn’t on the case with his film crews just yet, he should be. Robot cleaners might make perfect sense from a cost perspective and can do an OK job cleaning surfaces but they’re simply not made to get into corners or tackle what’s under the rows and rows of seating between gates 63 and 65. The harmless little dust bunny that used to scurry away when you sped past with your Rimowa wheelie has now been gorging on other bunnies, bits of food and the strands and scraps of exotic fluff that collects in hard-to-reach spaces. 

The other day I spotted a pair of MDBs so large that I thought they were going to devour a pair of toddlers who’d been let out of their tandem pram. Pooooofffff!!! They could have vanished in a flash but the MDBs decided the pair weren’t so appetising and tumbled behind a check-in desk instead, waiting for the right moment to strike. Next time you think that you’ve misplaced your phone or coffee at a boarding gate, you didn’t. A matted, greasy and stinky MDB got to it first. Airports might think that they’re being clever by replacing staff with automated cleaning devices but just look around and you’ll see that robots are leaving thousands of square metres uncared for and it’s only a matter of time before a MDB gets sucked into the engine of an A350 or invades a cockpit. You read it here first. 

2.    
On the topic of keeping surfaces spic and span, I landed from Chicago earlier this morning and I was impressed. Granted, I was mostly in and around Lincoln Park and the nicer stretches of North Lakeshore Drive but European (Lisbon, Athens, Paris pay attention) and many North American cities (you too Toronto) could take a few cues on keeping streets and vertical surfaces spotless from the good people of Chicago. 

I was pleasantly surprised by the lack of graffiti, the well-planted avenues, the attention paid to the urban canopy and the absence of so much as a candy wrapper in the gutter. While this was only a 24-hour trip and my first visit in about a decade, I’m keen to go back and spend more time walking around other neighbourhoods and getting a better measure of the place.

3.    
Finally, get your agenda prepped and at the ready for this time next week. We have an autumn packed with events spanning from intimate evening gatherings in our shops to bigger formats in Abu Dhabi, Zürich and London. And if you can’t wait for those, we can still find you a seat in Barcelona at our Quality of Life Conference – 4 to 6 September.

Enjoying life in ‘The Faster Lane’? Click here to browse all of Tyler’s past columns. 

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.

Airports have long suffered from an identity crisis. Are they public infrastructure or luxury malls with departure boards? Should we think of them as civic gateways or as necessary evils to endure while en route to somewhere better? For most travellers, it’s a place associated with queues, poor signage and hours lost to bureaucracy. But Paul Griffiths, the long-serving CEO of Dubai Airports, has a fresh idea – and when he starts to share it, he lights up. 

Leaning forward in his chair, he tells us about his vision of an airport that doesn’t ask for your passport, make you queue for security or hold you hostage at a baggage carousel. “You just turn up, pass through, drop your bag and walk straight onto your plane or into the lounge,” he tells Monocle, “No friction. No stress.”

Griffiths comes across as a Willy Wonka of global aviation, sketching out the blueprint for a kind of golden-ticket experience that few of his peers would dare to even imagine. On one wrist, he wears a sleek fitness tracker; on the other is a chunky, two-tone timepiece that catches the light. It’s an apt pairing of precision and polish – much like the aviation ecosystem that he’s trying to build.

“Why are we still sticking paper tags on suitcases?” he asks incredulously. “It’s demeaning. Bags should be manufactured with a unique serial number, with barcodes printed on. You should be able to track your luggage anywhere in the world and it should be delivered directly to you or to the transportation waiting for you outside the terminal. No more carousels. No more waiting around.”

This isn’t a mere fantasy. In Dubai, some of it is already happening. Biometric systems now let passengers pass through immigration using facial recognition, without the need for a passport scan. “The technology is here,” says Griffiths. “What’s holding us back isn’t the tools. It’s human hesitation.”

All of this might sound evangelical. But in Dubai, where major infrastructure gets approved and built in a fraction of the time that it takes elsewhere, it isn’t just optimism. “When I first arrived in 2007, Emirates had just ordered 80 A380s,” says Griffiths. “Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum [CEO of Emirates Airline] said one thing to me: ‘Do not constrain the growth of aviation.’ So we got to work.”

Dubai International’s passenger capacity has grown from 32 million a year to more than 92 million today; it has been the world’s busiest international airport for 11 consecutive years. “We have achieved that with less than half of the staff that we had back then,” adds Griffiths. “We went from 3,600 to 1,700 people. We’ve had to be more productive, more efficient and more collaborative with our partners than almost any other airport.”

That ruthless efficiency now feeds into the development of Dubai’s next big leap: the expansion of Al Maktoum International, a new airport expected to eventually handle 260 million passengers a year. On paper, that number sounds almost absurd – it’s larger than the populations of most countries. But Griffiths is already thinking beyond the scale.

“We want it to feel small – not like a huge, monolithic terminal,” he says. “I don’t want people to feel that they’re in an airport. I want them to feel as though they’re simply moving.” The plan involves having several smaller, self-contained terminals – “nodes” – linked by high-speed rail. “Think of it as eight perfectly designed mini airports, stitched together. We can use AI to optimise passenger flows. If 100 people on a flight are transferring to another, the system should direct that aircraft to a gate nearby, reducing walking distances.”

If Griffiths sounds like a futurist, he’s also a pragmatist. He is frustrated by what he perceives as the inertia plaguing his industry. “So many airports are still being designed around outdated processes,” he says. “Even when they build new infrastructure, it’s wrapped in the same old rules. We used to design buildings and retrofit technology. Now we need to do the opposite: design buildings around the technology that we want.” 

He points to the dehumanising experience of modern travel: the security shuffle, the repeated document checks, the slow-moving queues. “It’s like we’ve forgotten that customers are human beings,” he says. “The industry has accepted mediocrity. Staff aren’t motivated. Passengers aren’t respected. And most airports, especially in Europe and North America, seem to have given up trying.”

That makes Dubai an outlier but Griffiths sees his role as more than just running an efficient operation. He considers Dubai Airports to be a global prototype. “All we can do is lead by example,” he says. “If our ideas are copied by others, that’s fantastic. This isn’t about winning. It’s about improving the experience for travellers everywhere.”

The real breakthrough will be in reducing the time that things take. “I’ve never met anyone – apart from a few aviation nerds – who actually wants to spend more time in an airport. People would rather get where they’re going. So why are we still telling people to show up three hours early? That should be a thing of the past.”

If Al Maktoum International hits its 2032 target, traffic will start being moved from Dubai International to the new site – a big migration that Griffiths acknowledges will be “an extraordinary logistical challenge”. But he’s confident. “We’ve opened every terminal in Dubai on time and without fuss. We intend to do the same again.” And what becomes of Dubai International, the current crown jewel? “That’s for the government to decide,” he says. “But the development potential is enormous. Think of what Hong Kong did with the old Kai Tak airport. This land could reshape the city.”

Griffiths, now approaching 50 years in the aviation industry, isn’t ready to step away just yet. He is still energised by the challenge. “We must stop thinking incrementally,” he says. “If Google, Amazon and Uber reimagined entire industries, why can’t we do the same with airports? After all, the future’s here. We just need to walk through it.”