What problem is this system trying to solve? It seems to be, in this initial deployment, that the office park is too far away from the restaurants its employees want to visit, compelling them to drive there. I feel like a better solution would be permitting denser and mixed-use development, so employees can walk to their favorite restaurants on the ground floor instead of driving >1km to them or paying for a delivery tunnel.
I feel like comments like this always come up. Basically reducing it to, why not just become Manhattan?
They want a solution for today, not decades from today which is what urban planning would take. But also they likely want the neighborhood they built/moved to. They don’t want to live in a super dense mixed use plaza. They also want solutions that the plethora of communities like theirs can replicate. They just want a little upgrade to their bucolic life. They don’t want to hit the reset button. It seems way more reasonable to upgrade than try to reinvent it.
You don't need to become Manhattan to have density and mixed-use? I used to work at a place with a restaurant next to it (allowed by a reduction of parking minimums). Guess where a lot of my fellow employees are?
Maybe I am missing something — But what problem is it really solving? They want a hamburger quicker?
I personally enjoy the dichotomy between the burbs and city personally especially in Atlanta.
I don’t think quicker is necessarily the motivation. But currently they’re likely using DoorDash which requires a human and a very large automobile so I think it’s an optimization of that. It may also be quicker since it can more effectively work in parallel
It seems to me like the delivery bots you may see around some places. Except those things are pretty slow and I feel like they’re always involved in accidents with automobiles.
Classic straw man argument, there's a pretty big difference from a walkable and incrementally more dense neighborhood and Manhattan.
We're not going to tear down and rebuild everything all at once, it's going to take time and work to get us out of the massive car dependent hole we've dug for ourselves. It seems Atlanta has massively oversupplied (to it's own detriment) parking and prioritized space for cars, and neglected to consider that cities depend on attracting a sufficent density of humans.
Your quote only adds to the GP's point -- Atlanta is so far from being walkable that it will take half a century of very good urban planning before the problem solved by the article is solved in the way that would make the r/fuckcars posters that show up in every thread on this site about transportation would like it to be.
People arguing that Atlanta should just permit "denser and mixed-use development, so employees can walk to their favorite restaurants on the ground floor instead of driving >1km" as a short-term solution to the massive sprawl that is Atlanta have absolutely no idea of the gargantuan undertaking they are proposing and it's sort of ironic that they propose that undertaking as an "easier" solution to the problem than the one in the article.
I think it's telling that the person who made this comment used km -- it's obvious they are not American, and know very little about Atlanta or about the suburbs around it or how people live there. I, on the other hand, have first-hand experience.
Don't ask me about it though, I don't read replies to my comments on this hellsite
Atlanta as a metropolitan area should not be used to set a bar for walkability. It is a massive city. Instead, one should take neighborhoods and start there. Atlanta certainly has walkable neighborhoods, what it lacks is efficient infrastructure to get from one neighborhood to another.
I'm American and have lived most of my life in American suburbs. I don't like them very much, and I don't like the imperial system.
I don't think denser development is a short term solution, but I don't like short term solutions either. Short term planning is part of what made traffic in cities like Atlanta so bad. And IMO it seemed like a fair suggestion because extending these tunnels to every house in suburban Atlanta wouldn't be a short process either.
Most people move to Atlanta for the burbs! They move away from dense cities like Manhattan to have a yard and some space, without having to pay a lot of money for it, but still be close enough to the city.
But the jobs are all in the city, and they all want to drive in, which is why traffic sucks and midtown/downtown is one big parking lot.
I don’t think they all want to drive in. There’s no choice. For instance if you live in Gwinnett you have to commute to doraville for rail— it’s not a giant time save if at all any time save. They said it would take 30 years to get heavy rail to Duluth at a minimum ! Maybe my grandkids could benefit.
There’s also missing Marta stops such as Atlantic station, Cobb galleria, and ponce city market. Using the buses seems to be the short term work around but it is rather absurd.
It's not mutually exclusive, we can implement this while working on urban planning/re-design since that takes so long. But, we should start that in places already primed for it, like the straw man you mentioned, Downtown Atlanta parking lots.
There’s nothing straw man about it, it’s reality of suburbanite life.
I’ve worked in “walkable” office parks and have the time the guys at the office would get in a car and still drive elsewhere. It doesn’t solve for the overall problem.
The only way to actually eliminate the drive-to-a-place problem is dense Manhattanesque cities where vehicles are prohibitive for the average Joe and robust public transit exists to allow Joe to make a quick jaunt down the road.
If something like this is financially viable (doubt) then it sounds like the density already exists and the problem is the restaurants aren't near the people. All the replies are focused on the density you mentioned but mixed use is probably the bigger and far more easily solved problem.
Letting restaurants open nearby to where there are clearly a lot of people is a tried and proven solution, not gadgetbhan for food.
And/or encouraging more use of things like bikes. I'd bet that painting a bike lane and putting up concrete barriers is cheaper than trenching out a three-quarter mile pseudo-pneumatic-tube-system.
Have you spent any time in Atlanta in August? Biking outside is not just biking, but also swimming - through the humidity. I don't mind it (avid all-season mountain biker) but most office workers wouldn't opt for that in their fancy office clothing just for a sandwich.
As an Asian being sweaty in the summer is the worst part. My dad grew up in Bangladesh (in a village with no AC) and now even Maryland is too much for his taste.
This might have been true during WW II when flat feet and myopia did not exempt men from conscription. It has not, that I know of, been true any time in the last seventy years. I moved to the area forty-five years ago. This was not because I supposed that the 5:1 ratio (which some mentioned) would make women overlook my mediocre looks, shabby clothes, and so-so hygiene; but the chance it could be true seemed like a bonus.
33% of bike trips in the Washington area are by women. Assuming non-binary people are around 1% of trips, that puts men at 66%, giving an exact 2:1 ratio
And IMO you can't call a mode of transportation "fine" when large swathes of the population don't feel safe or comfortable using it (this comes up a lot when I talk to female friends about bus/metro usage too)
Thank you for clarifying, I get what you mean now.
That study is over a decade old though. And I would think that there's too many confounding variables at play there. IMO the biggest confounder is "society issues" that make women feel less safe in general in public spaces. In my local neck of the US, I pretty much never see solo women eating outside at night, vs solo men and mixed groups.
I'll never understand these sort of objections to convenience in favor of density. This is awesome and I can see it being a utility similar to water pipes or electricity going to a house for the same reason we all have mailboxes. Delivery is convenient and this could make it cheap and fast.
I'm not objecting to convince in favor of density because there isn't a choice to be made between the two. You can have convenience in low or high density development. The difference is in cost and complexity; high density development has all the convenience with fewer delivery costs
On this small scale, rebuilding would likely be more expensive than this tunnel. But extending this network to every home would be (IMO) on the same order of magnitude as redevelopment in cost, complexity, and time. Redevelopment is complicated during construction but this system is also complicated forever. Our cities are already being rebuilt piece-by-piece every day; I'd just like zoning laws to permit rebuilding with mixed use and higher density development
It seems like it would always be small scale, just replicated. I don’t think they’re trying to long distance delivery through this. Like if wanted a pizza from 100 miles away, I’d not expect that to be supported.
I’m seeing it like a LAN. Which is how most of America is built. Clusters of businesses supported by surrounding area of residential. Any interconnection would likely benefit from batched movement into the node (cargo truck) then items go into this as a last mile solution.
In some sleepy suburb you must pay for food delivery or hop in your car and drive to the restaurant. In Manhattan you could pay for delivery or skip delivery altogether and walk to one of the half-dozen (at least) restaurants on your block.
I live in London, and it’s very walkable and dense here compared to most US cities. Nevertheless, almost every vehicle is a delivery vehicle of some kind. Uber Eats deliveries and Amazon packages going everywhere all the time.
Some sort of city-wide underground packet switched (literally) delivery network sounds sadly impractical but would be amazing and take a huge amount of traffic off the road.
The answer to this is actually very simple and used all over the world by shopping centres and shopping district associations. You just run a free loop bus for a few hours during lunch time to bring people to and from the shopping district. Even in the US I have seen airport hotels do this in NY, SF and LA. I wonder why the default answer in US is often not simple public transport.
Exactly this. It's generally a service with positive externalities. Also this specific use case (lunchtime bus loops) exists in many parts of the world and they are clearly value creating overall otherwise shopping centres and districts wouldn't be running them.
When I worked in sewer inspection I heard a lot about the rate of degradation of in-ground infrastructure. One thing that was touted a lot was that the math doesn't work out at present; we can't replace infrastructure as fast as it degrades in net. I was curious if the 10 years since I've been NAASCO certified if things have changed or if non-water/sewer infrastructure was potentially different. Turns out, costs average out in the long term between above and in-ground infrastructure: https://www.roads.maryland.gov/opr_research/md-03-sp208b4c-c...
I'm curious if Atlanta has the same issues as you're familiar with. Under a thin layer of topsoil the ground is impermeable clay, and they don't have earthquakes. Known problems with the sewer systems go neglected without incident for decades.
Depending on when the pipe is laid (and sometimes you don't have a choice) if the clay is dry and then gets wet and expands it could crack the pipe. A cracked interior will always spread.
Clay, when dry, is rigid and I would think if the earth moves it's probably going to shove the pipe rather than move around it. That'd probably cause the pipe to either fracture or dislodge.
Even if none of the above happens that means that if they pipe does develop a defect for something more common (eg: a tree root intruding) then the running water will be split. It'd cause the clay on the bottom part of the pipe to begin to wash away either back into the pipe or it'll find porous material to seep through eventually eroding the structural support of the pipe. I've seen situations like this that basically create mini cave systems and the surface of the earth will appear in-tact until something heavy drives over it.
That said, I never worked in Atlanta so I'm not familiar with what defects or the infrastructure look like there.
Heck, try to get them to use their legs. We had neighbors two houses over that would always DRIVE to visit us - from their house. They thought our car was broken down whenever I walked half a mile to the grocery. America is weird.
To be fair, when I visited the USA, a cop threatened to fine me for jaywalking until he realised I was British. He then gave me a lift to my destination, because apparently the hood I was in was so dangerous that there was a real chance that I might end up getting shot.
That was the last time I ever tried walking in LA.
I'm not going to say he was wrong, but in my experience people here actively overestimate the chances of being shot.
One time I went to a fairly nice place that had some bars and shopping places. It was a pretty neat area, the people all seemed good, and it was very accessible to walk in. I told my family members and they looked at me with absolutely perplexed looks that I'd go in that area and were surprised I wasn't shot. Most people just repeat what they have heard.
I think it's pretty fair to suggest that the United States (with very limited exceptions) is the least pedestrian-friendly country in the developed world.
>Fair, but that doesn't mean every American is so lazy as to lack the ability or desire to walk places, as was suggested.
Most are but they aren’t any different to other parts of the world. I walked past someone getting in their car this morning only to meet them getting out a couple of minutes later at my local shop.
The only exceptions to this are countries that make walking easy and driving difficult. Without the carrot and stick the majority will take the easy option.
Last time I was in Colorado I got yelled at by a driver for crossing the street (legally, via a crosswalk). Here in the south, motorists are often intentionally aggressive towards pedestrians and cyclists (especially brodozers). Not a very nuanced situation, unfortunately.
Yes. It’s especially interesting to hear people say this when some states in the US are larger than some countries in Western Europe. For example Texas is slightly larger than France, and Montana is slightly larger than Germany. Of course, crossing state boundaries in the US does not introduce you to as much diversity as crossing many country boundaries in Western Europe. However, when you consider there are 50 states in the US, it should be reasonable to understand there can be substantial differences in habits and lifestyle.
I hear this argument a lot, Americans insinuating their different states are effectively almost different countries.
It is nonsense. Americans are Americans. Of course you have regional differences, no different to people from York and Bristol would. But you're not as diverse as you think.
Outwardly I'm sure Brits, Australians, Chinese, Indians etc all get lumped together in your head, despite each of those countries having extremely differing internal cultures spread across the respective countries. That's how the rest of us see Americans - LA and New Yorkers are not different, except in subtle ways only obvious to you.
There's a project in Switzerland to build an underground network of cargo tubes.[1] Cargo Sous Terrain has been making animated videos since 2016, though, and as yet has very little hardware to show.
Their proposed tunnels are 6 meters in diameter and have 3 lanes, traversed by AGVs.
Tunneling is indeed expensive, if that is how this will be build. Given that the footprint of such a system likely will be relatively small it might just be build in the same way we build other underground infrastructure of a similar size.
Or do you think they also didn't bother building sewers in Swiss cities and towns and are still all using outhouses?
> When the guys sitting on piles of nazi gold and the money from dead foreign despots say "nah fam, that shit's too expensive", there's no way anyone else could afford it.
lol, that's one hell of a top tier hyperbolic stereotyping trope supported "argument".
“Expensive” is always a relative term. The Swiss have a good overground rail network and for example branch lines sometimes run combined cargo/passenger trains. No need for dedicated tunnels here. Payoff in a city, especially with little existing rail infrastructure may look different. Hamburg for example tried to establish a 45cm diameter tube mail system in the 1960ies https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohrpost_in_Hamburg and that seems like a more viable concept for a city than a full fledged rail tunnel. The system ultimately failed for multiple reasons, but one was that the vibrations cause by cars and trucks damaged the tubes :(
While Atlanta has 71 streets named "Peachtree" [1] and Peachtree City (where people drive golf carts instead of cars [2]) comes close, Peachtree Corners names everything Peachtree. Highways, bridges, businesses. Moreover, it's a planned community, and they did it intentionally.
If any Dutch entrepreneur is listening: I have been dreaming about the same delivery mechanism for the Netherlands. Difference with Atlanta? There are canals everywhere, inside and outside the cities. It might be possible to just lay a waterproof pipe at the bottom of many existing canals to create an extremely cheap network for autonomous robotic deliveries.
It feels like repairing such a system would be significantly more difficult - if you get a crack or a leak, your whole system is suddenly flooded, and if you need to repair just one section, you have to find a way to keep the rest dry.
Repairing it seems easier than if it is underground, but certainly it has a failure mode (leak/ flood) that a normal underground pipe doesn't have.
However we're talking about fairly shallow canals (a few metres). I wonder what is the failure rate for reasonably priced semi-flexible prefabricated pipes with a diameter of maybe a metre, or even less.
Seems like keeping them pressurised would add yet more costs. I would rather let the sections fail (assuming it's rare) and have automatic valves sealing the failed section from the rest (something very simple, like an inflating balloon that fills the entire diameter of the pipe).
I think that moving inside a dedicated pipe makes it possible to deploy vehicles that are very simple yet fully autonomous. The only things a vehicle inside a pipe must take care of is keeping a reasonable speed, slowing down if there is an obstacle in front, and turning left/ right at marked intersections.
Boats are much more like traditional vehicles: they need to take in account the existing traffic, navigate a complex environment, and deal with weather conditions.
I was curious how the package is loaded and unloaded, given that it's underground, but they seem to have some kind of crane, and at the destinations they have basically a package locker.
Putting a package locker at every location seems kind of expensive. Maybe it works if you're delivering to bigger buildings like offices or apartment buildings, but it doesn't seem very practical for single family homes.
The described system is point-to-point from shopping center to office park. People in office park, that aren't closer to shopping center, would need to go to the hub to pick up their package.
It sounds like the company is focusing on company to suppliers. They mention networks but no details on that would be implemented.
I can imagine people sending sabotage packages, like a spray foam can set to release on a trigger, or sending down a car airbag, or straight up dumping oil or flammables into the shoot or other trash.
I wonder how long it’s going to take to break even. It’s pretty expensive to install piping. Even if you use no-dig tech.
Also, if they go out of business the infrastructure built isn’t going to be taken away.
The problem being that a huge part of rising construction cost in infrastructure is poor documentation of current infrastructure. You have a lot of stops in production when you encounter unknown piping.
I wonder if they could supplement their income by being an ISP? the "last mile" is (apparently) the single biggest cost in that industry as well. For the low, low cost of a few fibre lines (which can snarf down 100s of gigabits these days) you can provide "last mile" services to anyone at the end of your tunnel thanks to 5G. If you got even more fancy, design the system so you can drill into it anywhere along the way, and robotically add new taps (not to the fibre, but to copper or microwave lines) along the way. They have directional drilling already for drilling under highways or angled oil/gas pipelines.
That depends on the local legal framework. Many states have a one call program, and if you properly call the number anything you encounter that isn't marked isn't your problem if you go through it. (you still need to be careful as things can kill you, but legally you are not at fault for breaking anything that wasn't marked)
The hard part is in places where there are things of archeological interest. Most of the US doesn't have this as North America has a lack of easily accessible materials that will last and so the ancients mostly used things that didn't last. In most of the world (and parts of the US) ancient civilization often left things behind that are of interest.
This is an interesting idea and I’ll be curious to see if the economics works out, but I hope the company realizes that “pipe dream” does not have positive connotations.
I actually thought the name was cute/clever considering the ambitions they have. It also conveys an awareness that this is a moonshot product which is also suggests they are grounded in some rationality.
I always wondered why things like this weren't more prevalent, and the only answer I could come to was "jobs".
That is, given the networks of underground infrastructure that already exist, it seems like this would be totally plausible for pretty much any midsize+ city to build this out to replace all conventional mail delivery (that is, basically anything that can fit in a standard size mailbox). But that would result in tons of mailmen/women being made redundant.
Am I just misunderstanding the complexity of building out one of these systems? Long term it seems like it would be much cheaper than current last mile delivery. I also realize that there are tons of processes that are kept inefficient due to "jobs inertia", so I don't think this is something new. Whenever I have to wait in line at the neighborhood pharmacy to pick up a prescription, I always think "How is pharmacist still a job?" Everything seems like it could be made much more efficient if pill cases were standardized and you could just pick things up at something resembling a vending machine. I'm not saying I never have questions for a pharmacist or want them to review something, but like 50% at least of the stuff they do should be automatable.
Underground infrastructure is expensive. If anything gets stuck you are screwed. The most inefficient part of parcel delivery isn't the vehicle, it's having the delivery guy wait for the recipient to open the door for them. You could easily solve this problem by putting parcel lockers outside the building.
> Long term it seems like it would be much cheaper than current last mile delivery
yes, long term it might be cheaper, but to get to that long term you need to fund the huge upfront cost.
Why as a consumer would you want a pipe to your door, as you are now reliant on a single company for all deliveries. if they suddenly turn shit, thats it, you're stuck with them.
Its only really makes sense as a way for an uber dense city to reduce van traffic. but even then its probably cheaper and more efficient to use cargo bikes.
> Why as a consumer would you want a pipe to your door, as you are now reliant on a single company for all deliveries. if they suddenly turn shit, thats it, you're stuck with them.
How is this any different from phone lines, or cable, or water, or sewage, or electric? You can point out "yeah, and look at all the problems with those local-monopoly services!" but I think generally we've figured out how to provide those services at a good value, and even how to support/encourage competition over the same pipes/lines.
A common complaint people have is about their (landline) phone or cable company for the same local monopoly reasons. Comcast, etc. famously have high prices and bad customer service in the US.
I think for the pharmacists its simply economics. It's cheaper to have 3 or 4 pharmacists and a bunch of much lower payed techs on staff to do the work manually then develop and maintain automation while complying with existing regulations. I know some hospitals have automatic medication dispensing, so I'm assuming they have much higher volume where it makes sense.
Pharmacists can also catch obviously-wrong prescriptions - "This should be milligrams, not grams. If you take 20 grams of this, you'll die, in a spectacular and gruesome fashion."
(Granted, pharmacists can also miss things like this - which is why technology, checklists and humans working together are probably the best solution.)
I can't think of any situation where detection of things like wrong dosages, drug interactions, incorrect prescriptions, etc. couldn't be better tracked and identified by an automated system than a human.
The costs and complexity of working underground are huge. Most cities have fairly poor documentation and location information on any underground utilites that are more than 40-50 years old. Locally here we have a big project going on to expand municipal fiber. The contractors are every week hitting water lines, gas lines, or sewer lines that aren't exactly where they "are supposed to be" I can only imagine the final costs will vastly exceed estimates when all this damage is taken into account.
If you're already trenching tunnels through suburban neighborhoods, seems like adding residential fiber would be a no brainer. Could make the whole thing a lot more sustainable.
Maybe, but it isn't clear as if you do this and one system breaks the other system also has to be taken down for repairs. Sure you can put fiber in these tubes, but if the tube needs to be replaced you have to cut/splice the fiber inside. Likewise if a tube collapses (more likely to break the fiber than if it was surrounded by dirt) you have to do something about that fiber to get it out. So long term it could be worse to do this.
Note that we are talking about small tunnels here. A large tunnel that a human could walk in allows more flexibility.
This article hits home for me! I've been daydreaming about underground delivery systems for years, especially as I watch traffic pile up and delivery bikes swarm the streets. Imagine if food delivery went entirely underground – meals would arrive in a flash! The same could revolutionise e-commerce, eliminating delays for in-stock items at local warehouses. I've floated this idea to friends, but they often dismissed it as too futuristic or requiring impossible infrastructure. Seeing this pilot project in Peachtree Corners gives me immense hope! Maybe my underground delivery dream isn't so far-fetched after all.
I assume they are planning to have some kind of rescue vehicle. But the problem with this will be the traffic jam the stuck vehicle will cause. Not only will all the vehicles behind it need to stop as well, they also need to be rerouted in order to let the rescue vehicle pass.
The main difference of pumping water or gas through pipes is that the consumer does not care which part of the pumped product he gets. It's all the same. Delivering customer specific goods through pipes requires a very good management of the vehicle flow.
Yeah but if a Paris Metro train gets stuck, the tunnels are enormous and your maintenance staff can walk from the nearest station to repair and un-stuck the train.
It's not clear to me that these tunnels will be sufficiently large.
You send a recovery vehicle down the line to fetch it, capable of hooking it, and strong enough to tow/ drag it to an exit point or service "vault" just like "vaults" on underground tunnels for power, data, gas, etc. The tow vehicle basically just needs to weigh enough.
Or you send a human down the line on a platform with wheels. The tunnel would have to be at least as high as those crates and at least twice as wide.
There are far bigger challenges here, like the absolutely massive cost of digging / boring the tunnel and trying to amortize that over what you're delivering. You have to move a fuckton of Big Macs to have this make financial sense, and your competitors include "a guy on an electric bike making tips who uses a few KWhr of electricity over an 8-10 hour shift."
It's really hard to compete against massively subsidized public infrastructure (roads and ICE vehicles) when you're not subsidized at all.
Has any private company in the last decade or so had a successful startup that had to build massive infrastructure?
While I’m no fan of Musk and his management of Twitter has been a shit show, I must begrudgingly admit that he is damn good at building companies that produce real tangible hardware based products that require infrastructure
Ok get this. We make a spider bot that suctions to random cars going in the general direction that we want to deliver the package. If the car turns to go in the wrong direction, the spider bot jumps off and hitches to the next vehicle. Free transit, no infrastructure costs.
Considering this for kicks: People probably wouldn't like their fuel economy being tanked by the extra weight and aerodynamic drag of your spiders. So, as a driver, I might try to make my car slippery or otherwise ungrabbable.
Alternatively, I might try to let off the gas so that the other cars end up having to do the work of hauling the spider. Naturally if everyone does this, the whole gang slows to a halt.
Seems like it would be to me. So long as you monitor your battery charge you know the vehicle will get there and it can tolerate many imperfections in the tube. Pneumatics need a tight seal to the tube and thus cannot tolerate imperfections.
> So long as you monitor your battery charge you know the vehicle will get there
ahem, a BEV has __a lot__ more failure points than just "empty battery"...
sending a complex machine down a tube will _always_ carry the risk of the complex machine reading down. pneumatic tube "vehicles" are simple, they can not break down.
I am not an expert, I don't know which one is better or more reliable, but your claim that once you monitor battery charge, everything is hunky dory is wrong.
It's a mini Rubber-Tyre Metro for cargo. Low RoW maintenance (I think), high vehicle maintenance/wear, high energy usage.
The challenge to me: "just put it underground" isn't nearly as easy as people seem to think. There's a lot of people-placed stuff underground, and the companies doing it have likely been around longer than you, are pretty regulated, and nobody is going to want to change any of that for your Sandwich Delivering Subway. Especially because it is limited in purpose (cargo delivery, and fairly small cargo at that.)
Then there's all the shit that's in the ground not from humans. Roots. Boulders. Water. It's really fucking expensive to dig or tunnel, and there's no way delivering sandwiches and amazon packages is going to pay enough for it.
Assuming all that works out, there's still the matter of energy efficiency (which is terrible for RTM), speed, and capacity. I'm sure they can scale the "train" up to at least a few containers particularly if the container 'cars' are self-powered but non-rail vehicles use a lot of power. That means heat, not just the expense of the the power and hassle of either storing or transmitting it.
This does solve the main problem with pneumatic systems - even more tightly constrained cargo size limitations and massive power consumption.
Frankly, the Dutch are giggling at all this, I'm sure, because "just build a protected bike lane or shared-use path" is a much cheaper, easier, multi-benefit idea. Then not only can people get their sandwiches and packages delivered via a guy on a bike in a very energy-efficient way (a cargo bike uses about a tenth of the electricity even the best EV cars do), but they can safely bike to/from their office complex or home to other places. You've got something emergency vehicles can use in a pinch, too.
Looks interesting, trenching that will probably not be fun. Hope it works out, esp getting city to work with them. The first one to solve this idea is probably the next trillion dollar company.
Surprised no one has mentioned Zipline yet, the drone startup that got their start in Rwanda with gliders delivering blood by air. They went on to make a quiet drone that uses a cable attached pod to accurately place deliveries:
So it's called Pipedream and it's described as a "hyperloop for packages". All of that suggests "this will never get built" so I really admire that they have a working version if indeed that's the case.
This feels like the setup to a joke in an "AdamSomething" video where the punch line is you just end up with bad traffic in the underground stuff highway too.
> As the company’s name teases, the idea may seem futuristic, but it’s far from new. Let’s call it a cousin of the pipe-forward delivery solution favored in the 19th and early 20th century — the pneumatic tube. In cities like London and New York, networks of pipes that snaked underground and through buildings allowed people to send urgent packages, telegrams, checks, and at least one sick cat whooshing through offices, banks and mailrooms, powered by compressed air.
What a terrible idea. The pilot only has one pipe that goes between two locations. There’s no indication of how they would scale this to actually be useful for local delivery. And maintenance when the trolleys break down would be a nightmare. Just like the Boring Company tunnels, the folks who dream this stuff up don’t think about how it can scale beyond a demo. They just figure they’ll figure it out later, but real-world tech is not like scaling a SaaS product.
> The pilot only has one pipe that goes between two locations. There’s no indication of how they would scale this to actually be useful for local delivery.
Maintaining pressurized grids is hard enough for the systems in use in hospitals, and any small failure in a pressurized pipe has the potential for a huge disaster.
Yeah, but these tend to be enclosed inside of a factory, with no external factors like cable-seeking machines (i.e. your average backhoe) or terrorists to take into account.
Not clear why they want to put that into the tunnel. There are already autonomous solutions for last mile delivery: robots using pedestrian sidewalks. No need to bore anything, easy to navigate and to rescue if there is an issue.
>>Underground tubes are already the transportation method of choice for essentials like water, sewage, and Wi-Fi.
> There are already autonomous solutions for last mile delivery: robots using pedestrian sidewalks.
I have to say, it is a bold choice labeling those as a solution. Given the amount of deliveries done all day neighborhoods would be crawling with robots like this. So for neighborhoods that actually do have sidewalks, pedestrians would be hugely inconvenienced. Then there are neighborhoods that don't have sidewalks where these robots would need to share the road.
There is also the amount of resources needed for each solution. These robots are fairly complex, require batteries, etc. If they take off in a huge way that means a huge amount of future e-waste being created. Batteries need replacing often, these robots will break down, certainly in certain climates, etc.
Of course an underground system needs to be build at some point as well. However, it is much more of a one time upfront investment with lower costs down the road to maintain the system. At the very least you are not creating another environmental strain by having to fabricate a ton of batteries.
An underground system is also more likely to just work in various challenging climates. No overheating electronics in hot climates, no snow and ice related challenges in colder climates.
Delivery robots are cool. But they are, in my opinion, nothing more than a band-aid.
Delivery bots using pedestrian sidewalks are 1) limited to places that have pedestrian sidewalks, 2) are really, really slow, and 3) can very easily be stolen. If we’re talking suburbs, they are likely off the table.
Now, armored aerial delivery drones… dissuading dronejacking with robust self-defense/self-destruction capabilities, adequately advertised to avoid potential lawsuits… that’s the future we’re waiting for.
> building them will be cheaper and will benefit community more than building a tunnel
If you think sidewalks would benefit an entirely car-based community, I’d wonder if you’ve ever been to suburbs. You’re suggesting building (and maintaining indefinitely) the length of sidewalks, along with road crossing markings, signs, street lights, and all the rest that walkability comes with, to cover a sprawling area where, crucially, people don’t walk, and you are seriously saying that this startup is the money-burner?
Sidewalks will either fall into disrepair and be useless in a few months, or continuously drain the budget just for the benefit of [slow as hell and easy to steal] delivery bots. At this point, one might consider just moving those bots underground, so that they have no obstacles, are harder to steal, can move faster, can handle really large payloads like furniture/boilers/cars, and you have much shorter distances to maintain because they can go direct instead of being limited to public roads. As you can see, perhaps someone has given it a bit more thought than you.
Of course, you might want to consider decent public transit and replanning the entire area more densely, that would lead to useful sidewalks and actually benefit the community (and probably remove the need for these delivery trains), but in the US it’s never going to fly.
The only alternative to underground trains is armoured aerial delivery drones, and I tell you that’s where it’s at. If you don’t do it today, Musk will tomorrow.
Sidewalk fall into disrepair in few months? Here in my city sidewalks are keeping well intact for more than 10 years.
Is theft a huge problem? Electric scooters are everywhere in the streets.
Underground tunnel which is capable to fit furniture and cars will be extremely expensive. The whole idea for last mile delivery via tunnel is not economically viable.
A last mile solution that accommodates all possible use cases would indeed be expensive. One that handles 50% of deliveries? That seems useful. Would 50% be economically viable? What about 10% or 90%? Hard to know and probably will depend on many factors including the local geography. But even if it can't handle 100% of deliveries, perhaps it will be viable for a significant percentage, even if in just limited situations like a suburb with a sweet spot between the cost of adding subterranean pipes and high enough population density to provide high enough volume to justify the capital investment. Very few solutions are able to work for all use cases in all environments. That doesn't mean they can't be useful.
> Here in my city sidewalks are keeping well intact for more than 10 years.
They are not doing it all by themselves, especially if you live where there are seasons. If you don’t notice maintenance happening, it doesn’t mean maintenance doesn’t happen.
In the best case, sidewalk slabs tilt and settle unpredictably from frost heaves and water movement, and it only takes a small step between two slabs to trip an able person. If a sidewalk is maintained at all the lifted edges will be ground level, a yearly process. Just one example of routine maintenance that I notice.
Pouring squares of concrete might be less expensive than running an 18 inch unpressurized pipe through some terrain but building safe, long lasting, ADA compliant sidewalks is a far more complex endeavor than dumping some concrete on the ground. Do you stand by your statement that it's cheaper because you have in-depth knowledge of the costs involved or are you engaging in motivated guessing to advocate for a desired outcome?
To a point. Their usefulness is typically eclipsed by trains, drones, and direct insertion in the late game.
Let's extend the metaphor. If you're trying to move a small, intermittent supply of products from around 1km away to your base, do you build an underground belt (this startup's gadgetbahn) or connect it to your rail network (existing roads and sidewalks)?
First time I'm seeing this concept myself and it's intriguing at first sight! (will obviously have to do some scrutiny before drawing conclusions though).
It's evoking memories of Omashu & factorio-like games :)
So, Adam Something: "Elon Musk's Loop is a Bizarrely Stupid Idea", but instead of loop "We have the USPS already, convince Congress to stop destroying it"
Really now? That's the entire reason the US has problems with transit because some old rails are now bike paths? There really isn't any other reason you can think of?
Creating new right-of-way is terribly expensive and destructive. The old rail system used to provide mass transit, and it ran through the cities in the county.
The County also goes to great lengths to spend as much money as possible. When digging a new tunnel, the excavated material was used to stuff the old tunnel, meaning there was no increase in capacity. In another instance, once the tunnel was finished, the $$$$$$$ tunnel boring machine was sold for scrap instead of being reused.
Old unused railways being repurposed as bike paths actually can be good for general mobility, traffic safety, etc.
In the case you are describing I'd still say it is more of a symptom of an underlying issue to be honest. One you yourself do actually describe.
> The County also goes to great lengths to spend as much money as possible. When digging a new tunnel, the excavated material was used to stuff the old tunnel, meaning there was no increase in capacity. In another instance, once the tunnel was finished, the $$$$$$$ tunnel boring machine was sold for scrap instead of being reused.
To me this more or less seems to hint at an overall lack of vision on transit and traffic in general. Or rather, the unwillingness to do the investments necessary. Frankly, the fact that you even got biking infrastructure at all is sort of amazing and probably only happened because the investment needed was minimal.
It's not useful biking infrastructure, because of the way that the Cross-Kirkland Corridor is arranged. You can't really get to work, or to the store, or to school with it. Unless you work at Google, it's only really useful as a recreational route.
The purpose of redeveloping the rail line into a biking path wasn't to improve biking infrastructure, or reduce Kirkland's dependency on cars. It was to hamstring any mass transit that might go into that space.
It doesn't go directly to Bellevue Mall, but the line runs close enough to it that the mall is within easy walking distance, along with the rest of downtown.
I walk on the bike paths now and then. There isn't remotely the traffic on them like the parallel road. And that's in good weather. 6 months of the year, when it's wet and chilly, it's empty.
While transit would be carrying lots more people year round.
Then there's the rail line that used to run from Renton to Bothell, paralleling 405 which is gridlocked every day. A couple of people are on the bike path now and then, when the weather is good.
Sure, I get your point. In your specific case in your specific region, it is a shame that this did happen. However, the first comment you made was a much more generalized, broadly sweeping statement. A statement that effectively did seem to dismiss biking infrastructure or the investment in biking infrastructure. It is that statement I took issue with, not the highly anecdotal specific case it turned out to be based.
I can think of two rails-to-trails projects in my area. The first is the old Georgetown Spur, running from about the Silver Spring Metro station to the old C&O Canal towpath. That right of way was never used for passenger trains, it served two trains per week taking coal to a power plant in Georgetown. It was unprofitable for the railroad which gladly stopped the service as soon as the power plant got permission for deliveries by truck.
The second is the Washington and Old Dominion trail in Arlington and Fairfax Counties, which runs from Rosslyn to I don't know where--I've never been on it past Falls Church. That commuter line was shut down for many years before the bike path opened.
In general, the old rail transit lines around here have been long disused, unless they share the tracks with Amtrak and freight.
That's NIMBY neighbourhoods firing a pre-emptive salvo, to prevent those lines, and the easements around them from being re-developed into new transit lines. Presumably to keep the poors and undesirables and people without cars out of their beautiful town.
How would transit solve the problem they are trying to solve - a fast efficient manner to deliver stuff without human intervention? Would a person hop on a train someone be a better alternative?
Maybe that's the plan. Lure everyone into a false sense of security with the premise of "deliveries". Then, once the tunnel network is in place - BAM - instant pivot to a subway company! Suddenly public transport everywhere! The communists will have won before anyone even knew what hit them.
