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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

I have often thought:

Why isnt there an unmanned transport infrastructure which could be built between endpoints.

Take Hyperloop as a model-example. Instead of hyperlooping people about - why not only freight?

Imagine a mini-hyperloop enclosed tube about 10-feet in diameter, which has delivery sleds between hubs, which interconnect...

Then do a 20' diameter tube with sleds, and you have a trucking system which can be managed with BGP level routing experience...

View on HN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_Yor...

Everything old is new again.

As to why it's not currently done, if somebody comes up with a significantly lower cost method of doing purely underground construction (cut and cover trenching), directional drilling or small tunnel boring that doesn't cost a huge amount of money per linear meter, they'll become a gazillionaire. Not just "loops" but all electric, gas, water, sewer and telecom utilities will clamor for the tech.

Haha - Yeah - thats the basis.

Whats funny is when I was twelve years old - I designed a magnetic lev train built in a balsa-wood frame circle, with a cabin which was suspended in the tube-frame...

I was really pissed when Musk came out with hyperloop in that I was like "Any twelve year-old can design this!"

:-)

There's been a theory circulating around for a while that Musk's Boring Company is well-positioned to construct utility tunnels, and their seeming focus on transportation is essentially a loss-leader PR effort to drum up support from investors and the general public. Utility tunnels aren't exciting enough on their own, but there's a fair bit of money to be made in that industry.

Musk has been long mum on the subject but he recently said, at a National League of Cities event in Los Angeles on 2018-11-08 [1][2], that's he's open to the idea.

Of course, the big issue with tunneling, and construction projects in general, is often utility relocation, and not necessarily knowing where other utilities and surprises lie ahead of time.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2018/11/09/its-not-... [2] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/11/elon-musk-on-double-dec...

The problem with those tubes is that when things get stuck underground it is very expensive to repair them.

It was thought of, and built, in the past [1]. Most infrastructure-scale systems were abandoned for cost, maintenance, and operational reasons. And this was back when urban areas were more compact relative to their population, and not in an age like today when sprawling networks of government-subsidized, high-quality roadways reaching from an urban core far out into low-density areas are available for all to use for minimal cost.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube

>abandoned for cost, maintenance, and operational reasons

Because they didnt have the methods, systems, etc that we have avail today... We should look at this again.

I would pose, that the "random scooter rental" algo would do well within this space...

One of the most useful large systems of that type is the garbage pneumatic tube system on Roosevelt Island in New York. That was installed in the 1980s and has worked well. But big systems are rare. Disney World and the Grand Mosque area in Mecca have them, both being places with very large numbers of visitors.

These are common, and called "Trains"

Most people don't realize that those massively long freight trains they see crossing the country often have one, or even zero, people onboard.

When I lived in Wisconsin, Wisconsin Central Railroad was lobbying the state to allow it to run trains with only an engineer. It pointed to the safety records of freight trains in New Zealand running with no crew at all as a safety precedent.

I think in the end, it was allowed on routes where the railroad paid to upgrade the grade crossings.

You just reinvented railways.

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