A corridor that moves

On a Tuesday in a terminal built for eleven thousand daily passengers, one man walked the entire length of the moving walkway three times without ever leaving it, turning at each end and rejoining the belt going back the way he came, apparently for the exercise, apparently unbothered by the recorded voice overhead that repeats itself every forty seconds regardless of who is listening. That voice, calm and slightly compressed by the speaker's age, asks travelers to hold the handrail and to walk on the left, a courtesy observed by perhaps a third of the people on the belt at any given time, the rest standing two abreast with luggage between their feet, blocking a lane meant for motion. The walkway itself runs at a modest, unhurried pace, closer to a brisk stroll than anything that deserves the word conveyor, and its true gift is not speed but reprieve: legs that have already covered four gates get four hundred more feet for free. The rubber handrail moves at a slightly different speed than the belt beneath it, a small and permanent mismatch that produces, over the length of a long walkway, a noticeable creep, hand sliding forward of foot or the reverse, corrected by regripping every so often. Terminal maps rarely indicate where these belts end. Passengers find out only by arriving there, sometimes at a jog.

Arthur Pell