transportation in space settlements?

Thanks for the input, everyone!

I think the view that people should be mostly walking/biking is a common
one, but I'm not sure that's enough. A smallish space colony is similar
in size and population to a university, and while people DO mostly walk
at a university, if you look at any university map, there are plenty of
roads. Just about every building has a road (at least an alley or
service road) next to it, so it can be accessed by service and delivery
vehicles.

The same applies in a town: you may walk to the grocery store, but that
store needs truckloads of product brought in each day. And the couch
you flop on when you get home wasn't brought from the furniture store on
foot.

So, we probably need to first distinguish between personal vehicles and
commercial vehicles. We can probably get away with much smaller roads,
and almost no parking, if we allow only commercial vehicles.

It might also be possible to have broad walk/bikeways (of the sort
common on university campuses), and allow small commercial vehicles to
also use these, at a slow speed and yielding to pedestrians. I don't
know if that would be practical for all the daily deliveries that
support commercial and industrial zones, though.

Also, note that fixed-route systems (trains, monorails, subways) don't
really help with this problem. They're good at moving people, who can
walk the last 200 meters to their true destination; but not so good at
moving large goods (or large amounts of small goods), which need to be
at the store, not at the train station.

But since we're thinking about the future, I wonder if there are
developments coming that make this problem easier. We all know about
the Amazon.com delivery drones joke, but large (helicopter-sized)
quadcopters taking over the role of delivery trucks might actually be
practical soon. Instead of loading docks on the back, buildings would
be built with landing pads and loading docks on top. One problem with
this is noise -- current drones are noisy, and large ones are very
noisy. I suspect this could be mitigated with better technology, though
I'm not sure. Note that if the space colony has less than 1 G gravity,
then flying becomes easier and more efficient.

Also, if we have a ceiling for our "sky" -- say, because we live in a
torus, or in a cylinder with multiple decks -- then we might be able to
use that. I've dreamt up systems of delivery pods that zip along tracks
in the ceiling, and then spool down on cables, something like giant
mechanical spiders carrying crates of whatever. This would likely be
quieter and more efficient than quadcopters, though I'm not crazy about
the visual of dozens of cables hanging from the sky during busy delivery
times.

Finally... nobody mentioned moving sidewalks?!?

Cheers,
- Joe