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.
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.
“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 :(
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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)?
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"
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadThank you.
especially the talks are very much worth your while: https://idlewords.com/talks/
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.
They're likely only running a single tunnel during very early testing in order to keep costs down.
Their idea is basically a cargo-carrying, miniature version of a rubber-tyre metro:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-tyred_metro
..which is a century old concept. Thus well-understood, as evidenced by the wikipedia article listing their benefits and downsides versus rail.
It's not clear to me that these tunnels will be sufficiently large.
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.
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
I would bet the most common situation is the stuck vehicle is just stalled and could be pushed and/or pulled by the car behind or in front of it.
For pulling, you might use an automatic coupler like railways use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_coupling#Automatic_cou...
This.. has to be a joke? Surely they don't believe a "battery-powered autonomous vehicle" is more reliable than a pneumatic tube network?
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.
I don't know how the factors compare, but tubes are not perfect.
Great company name.
(Other tunnel-related company with a clever name: The Boring Company.)
Unlike the WSJ piece, the company web site has as you'd expect, no paywall:
https://www.pipedreamlabs.co/
Their proposed tunnels are 6 meters in diameter and have 3 lanes, traversed by AGVs.
[1] https://www.cst.ch/en
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".
Wait, I'm lost. How many bananas is this?
At least, that's what the video seems to show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STZJyfAl5bU
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.
It sounds like the company is focusing on company to suppliers. They mention networks but no details on that would be implemented.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peachtree_Street
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peachtree_City,_Georgia
It's evoking memories of Omashu & factorio-like games :)
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.
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 $$$$$$$ tunnel boring machine was sold for scrap instead of being reused.
In the case you are describing I'd still say it is more of a symptom of an underlying issue to be honest. One you yourself do actually describe.
> The County also goes to great lengths to spend as much money as possible. When digging a new tunnel, the excavated material was used to stuff the old tunnel, meaning there was no increase in capacity. In another instance, once the tunnel was finished, the $$$$$$$ 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.
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.
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.
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.
/waves in the general direction of Kirkland, WA.
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)?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACXaFyB_-8s
https://jacobin.com/2020/09/usps-postal-service-mail-voting-...
>>Underground tubes are already the transportation method of choice for essentials like water, sewage, and Wi-Fi.
Underground tubes with wifi? Good joke
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.
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.
Robots in the tunnel are not fast either.
Looks like a fun startup to burn some VC money.
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.
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.
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.
Are there any other negatively-named companies?
Note that we are talking about small tunnels here. A large tunnel that a human could walk in allows more flexibility.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They should add AI in there somewhere
This must be the same group that pitched MARTA.