Foodtube - transporting food like oil, water, and gas.
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
This is the typical example of something which seems to make a lot of sense, but well, doesn't. Exactly at which level would this be better then the current system?
Long distances - why is it better then rail? It's a lot more expensive, but the upsides are few and far between.
Medium distances - the equivalent of public transport for merchandise. You'd have to set up "distribution stations" for this to work, and you'll run all too often in a situation where you drive the merchandise to a station 1-2 km away, transport it by tube to the next station, maybe 15 km away, and then drive it again to the final destination. It's simpler and cheaper to just drive the damn thing all the way.
As for a "last mile" type of solution... I doubt there's any city which really wants to invest in this.
PS: Same day currier companies already use the subway system; they have a "mole" that stays in the subway and hands packages to curriers at each station.
;)
I used to think this is a great idea too, and got all enthusiastic about it. Somehow I changed my mind, no idea why... maybe trying to think about it being cost effective? I'm not completely outside the problem either: a few years ago a co-founded a small courier company, so I did spend some time thinking about how to best move stuff in a big city.
Right now I'd say the right way to go about things is more computing power. A "swarm" of couriers can probably be efficient and cost effective enough. The real break will come when we can have cars that drive themselves, so you don't even have to pay a full time human to move packages around.
But digging holes? In the few instances where you can actually do it, they're great. It's just that I really doubt it's at all scalable.
The problem is volume of dirt to be removed. Assuming circular tunnels, the volume approximates (pi(r^2))length. It's an O(n2) problem to increase the size of cargo.
Hence the focus on food, I suppose. For small cargos in densely settled areas this might be viable. For long haul I think that rail and road will still be king and queen.
Simple logic from first principles can prove this. How much does food cost per pound? Somewhere around $5 a pound seems like a roughly good estimate. How much of this is transportation costs? Somewhere around 10% is a figure that is commonly cited. Even ignoring the fact that most of this transportation cost is "last mile", which the tubes can't solve, you're still envisioning a plan in which tubes can transport goods at 50 cents a pound and still break even.
If we were able to transport goods for 50 cents a pound then, guess what, we've obsoleted a whole lot more industries than just food. People, for one, are a lot more valuable, even mail is more valuable. There's a reason why we don't have subways running through every one of our cities and that's because digging tunnels is freakishly more expensive than what this plan is envisioning.
To bootstrap, some "community" needs to decide they want it, and then they need to build a small but extensible version. Extensions need to be able to "interface" with the existing system without necessarily being limited by it.
I can see this working as, say, the main means of transporting physical materials around a new Olympics venue, or a new commercial district.
It's basically an automated high-speed rail system, but underground.
This is the blocker. The way I see this happening is a robotic inner-city courier that can live with humans on a sidewalk. The feasibility of this is no longer pie-in-the-sky, now it's merely "on the horizon". Once you have this, it becomes actually economical in another couple of years. Once it becomes economical, there are too many of them on the sidewalk and you start considering things like giving them their own lanes, or their own paths through buildings, or, eventually, their own access to underground tunnels. From there somebody works out that they can make money building a tunnel from Manhattan to the rest of the city, and the network starts forming.
The advantage of this approach is that once you have such robots you can start using current systems. Put a dedicated car on an otherwise normal freight train for these things, for instance. Eventually you've built a hybrid system that can accommodate all sorts of approaches.
It ends up looking like the Internet and will probably recapitulate its development. There's no point stringing a tube across the country from one endpoint to another unless you've got a network already working on both ends. Attempts to bootstrap will generally fail because they will be too focused on top-down deployments of massive tubes that won't be useful for years; the winners will be the people who successfully bootstrap from the bottom and build the network from the bottom up. The tech isn't quite there yet, though, but getting close.
So, I'd actually say it isn't even that "extensions" need to interface with the system, it is the system that will eventually be interfacing with the "extensions". The flexible robots have to come first, then we will build the tube network. Until those robots exist the tube network economics just make no sense, not even in a dense city.
I can't help but think replacing the current local delivery vehicles with electric would be cheaper and require less infrastructure changes. It would actually work better for electric vehicles since the routes are known and charge times can be scheduled.
If your going to build something like this, then just make it tall enough for autonomous cargo carrying robots so you can transport people, food, and packages year round.
17 billion trucks for each 25 million UK homes? Wow!
Presumably "17 billion [litres of diesel each year to serve] [strike: for each] 25 million UK homes"?
However, transportation is a tiny portion of the cost and ecological impact of agriculture. Massive efforts to try to address merely that small fraction of costs/harm are misguided.
Not that I can't see the appeal to businesses - instead of having to pay gas taxes, etc., you get taxpayers to foot your goods transport for you. (You "own" a section of the pipe, but big deal.) Furthermore, being an established player who gets food piped straight to you gives you a huge advantage over any upstart entrant into the market, since they won't get piped to without additional spending that the public will be disinterested in supporting and that your lobbyists can torpedo.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/26/world/americas/26iht-denve...
Also , this kind of project requires public investment. since it would be fully automated ,it would probably take a lot of driving jobs.This would be a hard sell for a public entity in a democratic country.
Story: At one point, I worked at a company that did clinical trials. They had this great computer controlled track with multiple cars that delivered all the samples to each lab (1 self powered car per sample). It could go straight up / flip over and the sample never tipped.
One day, a sample didn't arrive at one of the labs. It was frozen and we needed to get to it before it thawed as it, shall we say, wasn't a liquid. We traced the track an finally found it Alien's style when I turned a slow 180 with the flashlight as I was about half in the ceiling standing on a ladder. It had stopped because a rather large rat had not avoided getting hit by the car. I did not, at any point, think this was a logical consequence of my choice of professions.
I'm sure people smarter than me will figure out how to install repeaters to keep the food capsules moving and prevent a cheeseburger-traffic-jam 1000 miles below sea level. :-)