Walking in the Charlotte Airport inspired me to do some research into the economics of moving walkways. I’m currently sitting (in a wooden rocking chair!) in front of one, which clearly illustrates a common thought: why do people stand on moving walkways?

Often being positioned in areas designed to get you from one place to another (say, transportation hubs), I think it should be obvious that moving walkways do not exist to present an opportunity of leisure and rest, but to propel us faster toward our ultimate destination.

The paper “An Armchair View of Escalators and Moving Walkways” (pdf link) by Roger W. Garrison presents a neoclassical microeconomic analysis of exactly the trade-offs involved in deciding to stand or walk, and is an enjoyable, short read.

I’ll spoil the ending by giving this quote:

The only downside to exposing students to this armchair view of escalators and moving walkways is that they may never again be able to pass through an airport without thinking of indifference-curve analysis.

(Perhaps I will now attempt to collect empirical data on moving walkway usage).

• Giving a talk to my colleagues in Asia (via teleconference, sadly) about Git, how it works, and why it is super-concentrated awesome.
• Visiting my best friend and his lovely wife in Charlottesville, VA and attending the Top of the Hops beer festival. (Which sadly means I may miss this weekend’s Ubuntu Kernel Bug Triage Summit. Ah choices and obligations…)
• Giving a talk sometime in the next few months for NY.pm’s Perl Seminar group on some facet of Moose. All details TBD.
• Posing as a real Linux kernel developer and attending the Linux Plumber’s Conference in Boston. I don’t feel bad posing because:
  1. I believe that to be good at anything, you need to know as much about the level above and below the piece of the stack you’re most interested in. If you don’t have this knowledge, you don’t have a good picture on what you’re actually doing.
  2. I’ve spent a good deal of my time, both on the job and off the job, poking around the kernel and drivers to explain emergent behavior or error conditions.
  3. I really want to be a real kernel developer soon.
• Attending the BeerAdvocate Belgian Beer Fest (which happily is the same week as the LPC and in Boston).
• Trying out the non-permanent, non-furniture-like whiteboard on my wall. I love whiteboards and really love brainstorming with them. There is something less restraining with a whiteboard than dumping my mind onto a piece of paper. It’s a serious bummer that the whiteboards at work suck.