Chapter 6: Pulling Rollerskaters

Winter of 1975 found John and Gerardo had finished assembling the prototype system past the front of Gerardo's house in San Fernando Valley, a cable installed along pullys and idler wheels, one cable around each nearby residential block, and kept moving by an engine pulled out of one of the cars abandoned where they had finally run out of gas in the street, half a year ago. The pull-along scooters with seats and carrying case were not yet ready for it, getting parts was very slow; so this test was to be done by using roller skates, heavy gloves and a pair of long grabber poles held by hand.

Several very skeptical members of the City Council were there to watch. The four converted automobile engines were started up, their throttles set for constant speed despite varying load, reminiscent of the original Watts steam engine governor mechanism.

Marsha insisted on being the demonstrator, she would not miss the chance for anything; besides, her cute physique would perhaps distract attention from the inevitable glitches happening in any prototype test.

She stepped out of the house, with her roller skates already on, skated down to the cable which was now continuousy running past along the street in front of the houses on the block. She skated under the cable, turned to face the direction the cable was moving, reached up with one of the pair of yard-long grasping sticks and slowly increased the grasping pressure on the cable with it, the cable accelerating her up to its speed, and down the street she went rolling along on her skates effortlessly, pulled by the cable.

A couple of minutes later she re-appeared, having gone all the way around the block; now approached the street intersection corner shared with the other three neighboring block-encircling cables. Just as the cable was to bend around the corner pulley, she let go with the grasping stick, coasted across the street intersection, and with a bit of unpracticed effort she managed to re-attach the grasping stick to the next block’s cable, proceeding on down the street, intersection passed.

Gerardo explained that this could be expanded block by block all the way to downtown Los Angeles and beyond, a way to start getting at least the somewhat more athletic people back to work. And the roller skates soon would be supplemented by the pull-along scooters with seat and carrying case, for use by most of the rest of the commuters. And he continued to explain that as the workforce began to ramp up the available goods, a lightweight streamlined home-garaged type vehicle would replace the scooters, complete with automatic graspers and an automatic routing grasper interchange system coordinated to avoid collisions between vehicles crossing intersections. And that the commute system would be able to continue to evolve to far beyond that.

Marsha re-appeared coming down the far end of one of the blocks, came to a stop in her cute ice skater’s outfit in front of the staring City Council members, and said to them “Well, is this better than what you have got now?”