The reason Roman legions were as successful as they were was because of Rome’s bureaucracy and logisitical efficiency. Their road network existed to allow legion and their food trains to go anywhere in the empire unrestricted.

Same reason that the US military has been as successful as it has in WWII and at least some part of the 20th century- it’s never about tactics, it’s about mastering industrial logistics to move any gear, any where, with a day’s notice.

Yes. The Romans would have fucking KILLED for Excel.

Their road network existed to allow legion and their food trains to go anywhere in the empire unrestricted.

oh don’t get me started. The success of the entire roman empire was the roads and infrastructure (also aqueduct but less so). You can trace the success and growth of civilization to transportation technology. Direct correlation, close enough and rational enough (i haven’t run the numbers but I’m confident making an ass out of myself) I’m willing to say it’s causative. The biggest change we’ve seen has been computers, and integrating that fully into transportation (which we still haven’t done. because it’s nigh fucking impossible to get computers and humans to drive together safely. it’s almost like we need a new transportation revolution) will overhaul society. however we do it.

Putting computers on wheels was always a terrible idea. Computers go on rails. We’re failing to overhaul society because we’re using wheels where we should be using rails.

Reading the comments above, I wasn’t even done before I was imagined how to write this exact response lol. Guess I’ll contribute this instead:

Roads are for local human freedom, rails are for proper logistics, which is where you want your computers integrated as much as possible. People don’t realize that in WW2, most of the distance travelled by tanks was on trains, not by their own power which is very resource intensive.

my favorite fictional transportation invention was by Jasper Fforde. If you’ve read his Shades of Grey series (it’s the You Can’t See Color series, not the Bad BDSM series, and actually good to read. my favorite books right now) it’s basically a very very fancy conveyor belt that has higher speed lanes (like 50mph lanes) as you get toward the center, and all you do is step on and whoosh off from Reading to Cardiff. Except it’s also made of gel and eats people if they fall asleep on it. Science fiction and stuff.

conveyor belt that has higher speed lanes

by Jasper Fforde

Asimov was writing about that kind of thing in The Caves of Steel a decade before Fforde was born, and almost fifty years before Fforde published his first novel.

Arthur C. Clarke used moving walkways in Against the Fall of Night (later rewritten as The City and the Stars) in 1948.

Heinlein wrote The Roads Must Roll in 1940.

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis depicted moving walkways on film in 1927.

H.G. fucking Wells used them in 1887 and 1889 in A Story of the Days to Come and When the Sleeper Wakes.

But he didn’t invent them either. The first moving walkway was designed and built in 1893 by Joseph Lyman Silsbee.

Moving walkways have been in science fiction since the very beginning.

I’m frankly surprised Verne didn’t invent them in Paris in the Twentieth Century, but that’s probably more futurism than science fiction, so he wrote about asphalt, and cars, and gas stations, and high speed trains, and elevators, and fax machines, and something quite close to the Internet. In 1860. But, alas, no moving walkways.