What freight trains? ("In 2017, only about 5% of all freight in Japan is carried by rail ... Trucks carry about 50% and ships about 44%." [1]; "It is used relatively little for freight transport, accounting for just 0.84% of goods movement." [2])
Also it's apparently something they do. "And it’s not totally untested. The country’s Torigatayama limestone mine uses a 14-mile (23 km) belt, and in Africa a 62-mile (100 km) system moves phosphate between mine and port, SCMP notes."
Personally I'd think it'd be easier to make a canal but I'm not a civil engineer.
I think that just changes the question to "Why belts instead of some cargo trains" then. Scheduling would no doubt be an issue, but is probably tractable.
Tokyo and Osaka are both on the ocean (although, a bit roundabout path between them). You would think it would be easier to just do more cargo ships point to point.
I wonder how the ratio of people:stuff breaks down WRT boats and trucks. I’d expect trucks to be much more person intensive, but the vagaries of crew sizes and canal widths could throw that off I guess.
It seems to go from a single boatmaster to crews of less than 10. The smallest container ships for inland shipping are about 30-ish containers; the largest about 500.
A truck can do 2 containers with 1 driver.
So, an inland ship can do 15-30 times as many containers per crew, compared to a truck.
It seems like a canal with a current could have unmanned pods that behave like items on a conveyor belt. My best guess as to why a cargo belt is that maybe conveyor belts could handle slight elevation changes better than a canal.
>but JR shinkansen and other operators use standard.
That's irrelevant. The shinkansen tracks cannot be used for cargo trains: they're exclusively for high-speed passenger trains.
You can't share tracks between slow cargo trains and high-speed passenger trains. Not only is the scheduling impossible, but the cargo trains would ruin the tracks. The shinkansen tracks require frequent and thorough maintenance to keep them at the level needed for reliable high-speed service.
If you want to see what happens when you try to share tracks between cargo and passengers, just take a look at Amtrak. It's a complete disaster.
It's combination of tunnel ceiling height, weight limit, and chassis mounting compatibility. I'm not completely sure there were protectionism of either directions are involved with JNR/JR 12/20/31ft system and ISO 20/40ft, both seem to have been conceived around the same time in mid 60s.
Japan is very mountainous, so any flat land is really valuable. The proposal seems to suggest to put the conveyor belt in highway medians or tunnels below roads. Using highway medians sounds like it should bring a lot of issues, but it's free real estate on grades a conveyor can easily handle. Running train tracks there probably wouldn't work as trains are more demanding than cars when it comes to acceptable grades and curves. If they go with tunnels the rationale of the boring company applies: the smaller the tunnel the cheaper it is to dig.
I believe the conveyor belt restaurants are fading out at least partially due to some asshole teen recording themselves drooling on a plate and putting it back on the belt.
No, that's not the case at all. Conveyor-belt sushi restaurants are still quite popular.
What's different, however, is that (at least in the ones I've been to over the last year or so) they no longer put food onto the always-running conveyor.
Let me explain: a modern restaurant like "Sushiro" isn't just an old-style conveyor-belt sushi place: pre-pandemic, they had 2 belts. The lower belt just had ready-made sushi and you just grabbed whatever you wanted from the belt. The color of the plate told you (and the server at the end) its price. The upper belt, however, was used for direct-to-table ordering using the tablet computer at your seat. So you could order other things: soups, desserts, fresh sushi because you wanted it fresher than the stuff that's been sitting on the lower conveyor, etc. You'd order what you want on the computer, they'd make it and put it on the upper conveyor, and it would go straight to your seat (with a little "exit ramp" where you can pick it up).
Now, they seem to have completely abandoned the lower conveyor, and you just have to order everything you want with the computer. I think it was going this way anyway (because why take something that's been sitting out when you can order something), and that incident just sped things along.
Reminds me of the rue de l'Avenir, a series of parallel moving walkways set at successively higher speeds, used as public transport for the 1900 Exposition in Paris. It moved a surprising amount of people. I expect this conveyor belt has a similarly high capacity.
It would be interesting to know the fully baked all-externality cost of it vs alternatives. Tyre rubber, road maintenance, accidents, ship diesel, ports, people, trains, insurance. Anything removing a) complex, expensive moving parts or b) significant externalities or c) people, is a win (except for that jobs thing, but Japan has reducing population). Trains would seem the logical alternative since it touches three big cities on the route, and you could presumably enter/exit multiple places on the route.
Trains can handle some interruption, by orchestrating individual vehicle groups around. Surely for this to be as effective it would need a lot of that. Eg buffers, sidings, minor re-routing around issues. Main difference is the “track” moves, not just the vehicles. So you power and manage the track and the vehicles (shipping containers?) are mostly dumb and just need to be attached to it.
The auto-handing to get freight to destinations is big advantage. This is not about delivering from one end to the other, which is better done by ship, but about sending materials to and from entities within the intensively populated and industrialised region.
Engineering issues include maintenance on the many rollers and other moving parts, wear and tear on the belts, uptime when maintenance is happening and general inefficiency in energy, speed and asset utilisation versus rail.
The problem with Japan would be the word "immigrant" with a large number, and "generous incentives", which I didn't believe ever happens in Japanese companies.
On a maybe more serious note, and in direct contradiction to what I would've thought and thus wrote above, according to what I've just been told (I mentioned this story to a Japanese person who works in shipping) truck drivers and bus drivers get a really good wage in Japan but still they can't attract people into the job.
They have the same problem in America too. There's very good reasons for this:
1. Truck driving requires extensive (and expensive) training and licensing. You can't just hire some immigrants to do it for you. Driving such a large vehicle on narrow, crowded roads requires a lot of skill and training, and is very dangerous. This creates a large barrier of entry into the career. Who's going to pay for this training? 1.a. With immigrants, how do you train them when they don't speak the language? And if you train them in another language, how do they function when they can't talk to anyone they work with (customers), or the occasional police interaction? Are you suggesting that Japan needs to pay immigrants to go to language school for 2 years before starting truck-driving school? This career isn't that highly-paid.
2. Truck driving is hard on your body, particularly your back. Check out American truck drivers nearing retirement age and look at their general health.
3. Truck driving usually takes you far from home for long durations (probably not quite as bad in Japan since it's a smaller country than the US). Most people want to go home to their families after work.
Face it: truck driving is a shitty job. The more it can be replaced with automation, the better.
According to the Secret Life of Groceries, truckers go into debt to fund their training, and largely just take on more and more debt in order to do jobs, in the hope of paying off the debt on their truck.
Nobody is paying to pay truckers for training when they can instead convince the trucker to train themselves, pay for their own truck, but be limited by contract to be an "independent contractor" that can only take on contracts for one company at a loss
>Nobody is paying to pay truckers for training when they can instead convince the trucker to train themselves, pay for their own truck, but be limited by contract to be an "independent contractor" that can only take on contracts for one company at a loss
The article is about Japan; I only briefly compared to America. I think what you're describing (truckers owning trucks) might be unique to America, but I'm not sure. Even there, a lot of trucking companies do not use independent truckers, but just hire them as employees. Walmart for instance absolutely does not use independent truckers; their trucks all have "Walmart" painted on the side.
Anyway, I've heard in the last 5 years or so in America that there's a bigger and bigger trucking shortage, so I'm guessing that scheme you refer to probably isn't working out so well any more, and companies are going to have to buy their own trucks and hire truckers as regular employees.
In the world of Asimov's I Robot book, conveyor belt walkways are common transportation mechanism. The Japan conveyor belt system can ship both goods and people around.
We’ve had children longer historically than conveyor belts. Therefore we need more children and not belts if we, as people, want to leave a legacy of humans instead of a legacy of literal actual real life conveyor belts.
Also, this is just one symptom. If the only problem of humans being/needing to be replace by conveyor belts than, yay. Ok, maybe. But I think it’s more like the bubbles underneath paint of your ceiling or that mud tube on the outside of a house. It’s a warning sign of what’s to come and not the finality of consequences.
Or maybe not, this article didn’t speak about any of that but I’d wager a 41% transport shortage is big problem for food/medicine/toilet paper etc which can only lead to problems as we just recently experienced with Covid and civil unrest. I’d also be willing to bet this will be problematic for things like house and goods price stability, hospitals, schools, whatever kind of public works they have and societal fall nets, and what about the really crappy jobs people want to do less than trucking? The exceptional quality of life that many of our countries from which we post are only possible by the lowest rung of ladder holding it all up.
Not to mention that on the whole of it humans are good! We love, love, create, invent, hack, explore. Yeah there’s bad stuff too but I think the extreme comfort in which many of us finds us helps to numb us the goodness around us and we just get a thrill from the bad.
At least that my argument to your stated questions and implied construction. Ie why did we need all those humans anyways, they were unnecessary and a drain. Excuse me if I assumed the later.
Anyways, that’s just, like, my opinion man so maybe I’m wrong.
Consider two candidate numbers of kids: k2 > k1. Which is a better quantity of kids? Is it k2?
Don't get me wrong. I'm a fan of humans, in general. Given our (current) means, I think there can be such a thing as too many, globally or locally.
We maintain hunting seasons for certain animals. One of the ostensible purposes is that, with the current dynamics, animals like deer would over-populate in some areas. This would cause suffering in deer. It would also have ripple effects throughout the system. I'm not proposing that we hunt people. I'm saying that within the constraints of a system (like earth or a local system) there's an ideal number of people.
People have their own reasons for having kids or not. Humans are one of the most wildly successful species on the planet. We are FAR from having to worry about not having a legacy.
"Due a lack of truck drivers" at the price they are willing to pay. So this is an optimization. That's fine. But optimized systems tend to be fragile. A belt breakdown will be less frequent that a truck problem, but will have a much larger impact.
Not only that, but many Japanese companies are notoriously inefficient, with lots of people tasked with bullshit jobs. Maybe they could also try to optimize a bit...
You can't just grab some random worker and hand them the keys to a truck. Truck driving requires a lot of expensive training, and it's a shitty job that not many people want to do anyway because it takes them away from home too much.
I don't think that would help anything. If someone unauthorized uses the lane, what should happen? Trucks just crash into them? I don't think that will work. If they're using a lane in a road, they'll still have to solve the full hard autonomous driving problem. So then, what's the point of the lane at all?
How will the autonomous trucks get to the protected lane? What will they do when they have mechanical problems? What will the trucks behind them do? Where will traffic go that was using that lane before? How is this better than a freight train?
I was thinking this when I first read about the conveyor belt proposal. Years ago, Japan cut down on the hours drivers could do because many were driving too many. So, they tried to get more drivers by making it a career path for more people. Getting licensed to drive and having a life situation where you can be on the road for days is something very few have the ability to do. Add to this the population shrinkage and aging which further hinders this. I can honestly say that this is probably the only solution that will work for this problem. As for rail freight, I think it would be a good idea but as seen with recent linear rail it may be difficult to get anything that would be purpose fulfilling in this regard (yes, Japan has commuter trains but those rails are painfully busy so moving freight is getting more difficult).
Yeah you would need various locations of maintenance and the ability to have swap out parts all along the path i think?
The benefit of truly constant full bidirectional throughput seems to be defeated by problems somewhere along the line. Maybe distributed electrical power is a benefit somehow?
Maybe this is a truly japanese only possibility, the same way vending machines dont get vandalized, maybe they dont have terrorists and vandals?
The article is misleading, I've read the actual report in Japanese. It's not trying to built Tokyo-Osaka conveyor belt, too expensive, too close the the realm of sci-fi.
What they're trying to do is to use the current trucking between metropolitans -Japan is not eager to just "erase" jobs - then switch to the conveyor belt system connecting into the city. What' they're trying to build, are these switch hubs and the underground conveyor system.
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[ 12.2 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadAlso it's apparently something they do. "And it’s not totally untested. The country’s Torigatayama limestone mine uses a 14-mile (23 km) belt, and in Africa a 62-mile (100 km) system moves phosphate between mine and port, SCMP notes."
Personally I'd think it'd be easier to make a canal but I'm not a civil engineer.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Freight_Railway_Company#...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Japan
Cargo ships would be high bandwidth, high latency.
For example, I think trucks would be better for perishable goods.
I suspect the real answer here is that the report was just some exploratory thinking, and unlikely to really happen.
It seems to go from a single boatmaster to crews of less than 10. The smallest container ships for inland shipping are about 30-ish containers; the largest about 500.
A truck can do 2 containers with 1 driver.
So, an inland ship can do 15-30 times as many containers per crew, compared to a truck.
That's irrelevant. The shinkansen tracks cannot be used for cargo trains: they're exclusively for high-speed passenger trains.
You can't share tracks between slow cargo trains and high-speed passenger trains. Not only is the scheduling impossible, but the cargo trains would ruin the tracks. The shinkansen tracks require frequent and thorough maintenance to keep them at the level needed for reliable high-speed service.
If you want to see what happens when you try to share tracks between cargo and passengers, just take a look at Amtrak. It's a complete disaster.
Sometimes I think ideas are published so that people in forums such as HN can come up with better solutions that they then learn from.
What's different, however, is that (at least in the ones I've been to over the last year or so) they no longer put food onto the always-running conveyor.
Let me explain: a modern restaurant like "Sushiro" isn't just an old-style conveyor-belt sushi place: pre-pandemic, they had 2 belts. The lower belt just had ready-made sushi and you just grabbed whatever you wanted from the belt. The color of the plate told you (and the server at the end) its price. The upper belt, however, was used for direct-to-table ordering using the tablet computer at your seat. So you could order other things: soups, desserts, fresh sushi because you wanted it fresher than the stuff that's been sitting on the lower conveyor, etc. You'd order what you want on the computer, they'd make it and put it on the upper conveyor, and it would go straight to your seat (with a little "exit ramp" where you can pick it up).
Now, they seem to have completely abandoned the lower conveyor, and you just have to order everything you want with the computer. I think it was going this way anyway (because why take something that's been sitting out when you can order something), and that incident just sped things along.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rue_de_l%27Avenir
Trains can handle some interruption, by orchestrating individual vehicle groups around. Surely for this to be as effective it would need a lot of that. Eg buffers, sidings, minor re-routing around issues. Main difference is the “track” moves, not just the vehicles. So you power and manage the track and the vehicles (shipping containers?) are mostly dumb and just need to be attached to it.
The auto-handing to get freight to destinations is big advantage. This is not about delivering from one end to the other, which is better done by ship, but about sending materials to and from entities within the intensively populated and industrialised region.
Engineering issues include maintenance on the many rollers and other moving parts, wear and tear on the belts, uptime when maintenance is happening and general inefficiency in energy, speed and asset utilisation versus rail.
On a maybe more serious note, and in direct contradiction to what I would've thought and thus wrote above, according to what I've just been told (I mentioned this story to a Japanese person who works in shipping) truck drivers and bus drivers get a really good wage in Japan but still they can't attract people into the job.
1. Truck driving requires extensive (and expensive) training and licensing. You can't just hire some immigrants to do it for you. Driving such a large vehicle on narrow, crowded roads requires a lot of skill and training, and is very dangerous. This creates a large barrier of entry into the career. Who's going to pay for this training? 1.a. With immigrants, how do you train them when they don't speak the language? And if you train them in another language, how do they function when they can't talk to anyone they work with (customers), or the occasional police interaction? Are you suggesting that Japan needs to pay immigrants to go to language school for 2 years before starting truck-driving school? This career isn't that highly-paid.
2. Truck driving is hard on your body, particularly your back. Check out American truck drivers nearing retirement age and look at their general health.
3. Truck driving usually takes you far from home for long durations (probably not quite as bad in Japan since it's a smaller country than the US). Most people want to go home to their families after work.
Face it: truck driving is a shitty job. The more it can be replaced with automation, the better.
Nobody is paying to pay truckers for training when they can instead convince the trucker to train themselves, pay for their own truck, but be limited by contract to be an "independent contractor" that can only take on contracts for one company at a loss
The article is about Japan; I only briefly compared to America. I think what you're describing (truckers owning trucks) might be unique to America, but I'm not sure. Even there, a lot of trucking companies do not use independent truckers, but just hire them as employees. Walmart for instance absolutely does not use independent truckers; their trucks all have "Walmart" painted on the side.
Anyway, I've heard in the last 5 years or so in America that there's a bigger and bigger trucking shortage, so I'm guessing that scheme you refer to probably isn't working out so well any more, and companies are going to have to buy their own trucks and hire truckers as regular employees.
there are so many eager truck drivers, they have to put bollards around large gatherings of people now.
Also, this is just one symptom. If the only problem of humans being/needing to be replace by conveyor belts than, yay. Ok, maybe. But I think it’s more like the bubbles underneath paint of your ceiling or that mud tube on the outside of a house. It’s a warning sign of what’s to come and not the finality of consequences.
Or maybe not, this article didn’t speak about any of that but I’d wager a 41% transport shortage is big problem for food/medicine/toilet paper etc which can only lead to problems as we just recently experienced with Covid and civil unrest. I’d also be willing to bet this will be problematic for things like house and goods price stability, hospitals, schools, whatever kind of public works they have and societal fall nets, and what about the really crappy jobs people want to do less than trucking? The exceptional quality of life that many of our countries from which we post are only possible by the lowest rung of ladder holding it all up.
Not to mention that on the whole of it humans are good! We love, love, create, invent, hack, explore. Yeah there’s bad stuff too but I think the extreme comfort in which many of us finds us helps to numb us the goodness around us and we just get a thrill from the bad.
At least that my argument to your stated questions and implied construction. Ie why did we need all those humans anyways, they were unnecessary and a drain. Excuse me if I assumed the later.
Anyways, that’s just, like, my opinion man so maybe I’m wrong.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a fan of humans, in general. Given our (current) means, I think there can be such a thing as too many, globally or locally.
We maintain hunting seasons for certain animals. One of the ostensible purposes is that, with the current dynamics, animals like deer would over-populate in some areas. This would cause suffering in deer. It would also have ripple effects throughout the system. I'm not proposing that we hunt people. I'm saying that within the constraints of a system (like earth or a local system) there's an ideal number of people.
People have their own reasons for having kids or not. Humans are one of the most wildly successful species on the planet. We are FAR from having to worry about not having a legacy.
No. They actually literally running out of people to do all the needed jobs. Japan has among the lowest birth rates in the world.
They could pay more for truck drivers, and then have a shortage somewhere else. There just aren't enough people for all the jobs.
> they'll still have to solve the full hard autonomous driving problem
Not for a highway with no entrance and exits between the 2 cities
> So then, what's the point of the lane at all?
It won't take a decade and $20B to build
where I live politics, greed, and the stupidity of the powerful boasted trucks and crippled trains
So we have an intermediate step here
A conveyer belt spreads the moving parts over hundreds of miles; with trains you can push all them cars to a yard for maintenance at a single point.
The benefit of truly constant full bidirectional throughput seems to be defeated by problems somewhere along the line. Maybe distributed electrical power is a benefit somehow?
Maybe this is a truly japanese only possibility, the same way vending machines dont get vandalized, maybe they dont have terrorists and vandals?
What they're trying to do is to use the current trucking between metropolitans -Japan is not eager to just "erase" jobs - then switch to the conveyor belt system connecting into the city. What' they're trying to build, are these switch hubs and the underground conveyor system.