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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Given just how much our lives in urban areas depend on package and prepared food delivery and grocery delivery, I've often wondered where the point is where vacuum-tube delivery to individual apartment buildings becomes cheaper?

If the "last mile" of all deliveries for all items under, say, 1.5 feet in diameter, were handled via computer-controlled canister. (Or these days, if it weren't even by vacuum, but just electric motors buzzing down tubes.) Where your hot dinner arrives in 5 minutes rather than 25, and your Amazon Prime purchase shows up from the warehouse in 20 minutes rather than next-day.

For places like Manhattan, it's just hard for me to imagine that over a decade, it wouldn't be cheaper to build and use a system like that, than to maintain our current army of tens of thousands of delivery people across restaurants, UPS, Amazon, USPS, etc.

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Why bother installing all the infrastructure? "Move fast and break things" with ballistic delivery! There's usually something close to a parabolic arc that will get where it needs to... Of course things (like pizza) that don't deal well with being crushed into cylinders at high acceleration (and jerk) probably won't do well in either. But canned liquids should do it justice.

Lot's of impact absorbing material to carted off as trash though so not really eco friendly.

So I'm hearing T-Shirt cannon, but for beer?

I guess you'd have stuff colliding in mid-air and crashing to the ground, but it did occur to me that just launching stuff into the air with very precise cannons and catching it in nets would be far cheaper than a system of tubes.

Too bad earth's gravity isn't a little different, then it might be more feasible!

There is an excellent short sci-fi film exploring this concept by a former technical director at Pixar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv30ExfoKcc

This is neat. More broadly, wonder why a tubing system isn’t used for common waste and recycling?

In some tall old apartament buildings here there are chutes for waste - the problem with them is that they are cockroach highway.

Good point, would be quite a nuisance.

New York and some other cities had such a thing over a hundred years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_Yor...

I'm actually guessing that, while fewer packages, there were probably more deliveries 100 years ago than there are today. A huge amount of shuffling paper around--see bicycle messengers--has been replaced with electronic transfers.

ahh you beat me to it… "fax me a burrito"

When I did Domino’s Pizza delivery, some addresses were well known, and for most addresses we did not need directions because we delivered to those neighborhoods so often. So, I see what you mean. However, I think tubes would be too much maintenance. I think low-altitude package throwing from building to building would be better. Every building would have a net and a catapult/canon on it. That would not work for cooked meals but could work for some fragile items. To prevent failures from falling on people’s heads....

I re-evaluate my idea. Have wires running from building to building, and just have a motorized package holding robot slide down those wires to the right building.

It would be kind of interesting if skyscrapers were connected to each other via gondola lifts/aerial trams. However, I don't think this could be retrofitted, since likely supporting the cabling and trams was not in the original structural design of most skyscrapers.

Seems like a hard business proposition. Huge infrastructure investment upfront, heavy maintenance needed, you get a very inflexible system, etc. Not to mention, what happens when Amazon uses 99% of the capacity and you can’t get your package through?

It’s hard to beat trucks and minimum wage drivers (and everyone’s hoping that the “driver” part of the equation will be removed sooner rather than later)

If we’re going super future, drones seem more plausible.

I don't know though. If they're just "dumb" tubes with smart commoditized capsules, it seems like maintenance could be relatively low.

And obviously Amazon using 99% capacity isn't a worry because 1) it would have to be built for full demand for a planned population and 2) in times of over-demand, market-based pricing simply selects consumers willing to pay the most.

Beating trucks and minimum wage drivers has to happen at some point. Drones might be useful in suburbs and more rural areas, but I'm trying to imagine constant swarms of them all day long over Manhattan and it looks like a nightmare to me.

I haven't done the math but my guess would be the maintenance costs would be pretty high over time and as energy costs drop, drones could be feasible.

The reality is that food delivery already has high costs for vehicle maintenance and the person doing the delivery often bears that burden themselves, as well as being typically underpaid or in danger of wage insecurity, along with lack of benefits. Those are hidden/socialized costs of our current food service and delivery infrastructure. Engineering a robot that may not be economically desirable when the current system lets you offload a significant cost of human labor.

I often wonder about food as a provided utility in some future. Interesting idea to deliver by tube.

New York already has an underground steam system. They're constantly digging that up for maintenance. While they're in there maybe this could be installed.

There was a movie where no one leaves the house and everything was delivered by pipes. The kitchen had pipes for everything: milk pipes, syrup pipes, etc. And outside the house was just a big dark infrastructure filled with pipes.

I can't recall the name... (It's not "Meet the Applegates" but I think it might have come out around the same time. Had a real "Brazil" feeling to it. Might have been British.)

Are you thinking of "Dark City"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_City_%281998_film%29

No, but that's an awesome movie too. Cheers

My co-op in midtown has an old US postal pneumatic system.

vacuum tube delivery might just deliver covid at high velocity everywhere.

I propose electronic delivery methods, maybe DSL + 3d food/widget/organ printers. The printers would require anti-virus software.

larger mail boxes with arrival notification on your phone would serve the same function with much smaller investments.

The point is for it to be far faster and far cheaper.

Larger mail boxes and notifications achieves neither.

Our customers want faster horses, not cars ;)

> I've often wondered where the point is where vacuum-tube delivery to individual apartment buildings becomes cheaper?

If you're including everything into the factoring: never.

> For places like Manhattan, it's just hard for me to imagine that over a decade, it wouldn't be cheaper to build and use a system like that

Allocation calculations never actually function that way. Your premise can only exist in a vacuum where humans and governments and corporations don't exist, only robots. There's no omnipotent creature that can forcibly pull the unit capital away from the army of tens of thousands of deliveries and centralize it to the tube system instead. It won't self-organize because the cost calculations for traditional deliveries are individualized (I pay $5 for my pizza or sandwich delivery; not $50,000 in personal taxes for a hopeful tube system I'll never get my money back out of in my lifetime), whereas to pay for the super tube system you have to slam everyone (have to spread it out to everyone) with a massive on-going cost until it's finished (which none of them will want to pay), for services maybe they'll use in the future (it'll take multiple generations to justify the cost, which you won't be able to convince individual taxpayers to fund when there is an existing functional system that is 85% good enough).

The cost requires an extreme centralized outlay of capital, which nobody can raise given the other factors; nobody can get the building done, and nobody can get through the zoning and regulations, and nobody can spare the 10x time requirement (10x worse than it should be, as all construction is these days) to get through all of it.

It requires a nationalized step-in by some large government authority. They have to simultaneously outlaw the old system (or hyper tax it to death, same thing in effect), while drilling people on taxes to supposedly build the new system (which will take forever, go drastically over-budget, and underwhelm for the value vs cost in the end).

1.6 million people live in Manhattan. Do the math for just 500,000 * $50,000 = $25 billion. That $25b figure is likely on the low side by anywhere from 2x to 4x minimum, if you attempted to tear up all of Manhattan to do it. The cost would be staggering, and then it would take decades to reach completion.

Nobody is signing up for those taxes so they can get their pizza or Amazon delivery via a tube instead.

I can't speak to the exact costs involved, obviously.

But I believe you're being far too pessimistic as to organizing it. The "omnipotent creature" to organize it just... city government. Roads and utilities are already built/managed well enough. You're right it won't "self-organize" -- the city has to contract and build it. It's paid for, like other large projects are, out of bonds paid off over deacdes by taxes, and/or contracts to operate. Nobody has to "outlaw the old system".

You just build it gradually, and UPS/USPS/etc. will take advantage of it wherever it can (for all addresses supported) because it will be by definition cheaper.

Governments manage big infrastructure projects all the time. This is how major bridges and tunnels get built. All of your arguments apply to pretty much most big government projects.

> Nobody is signing up for those taxes so they can get their pizza or Amazon delivery via a tube instead.

My point is that yes they absolutely will if it's cheaper in the end. Making up numbers, if you spend $400/year on last-mile shipping and delivery, it's financed by bonds up-front, and the extra taxes are on average $200/year/person for the next 40 years (but with progressive taxation)... then of course people would be signing up for that. Vastly better delivery service for half the price? Why wouldn't they be?

Look at how much trouble NYC has had building new subways over the last few decades. That's a system that already works (pretty) well, that people trust and believe in and are invested in, and yet they can barely get enough fiscal buy in to do maintenance.

Sure, but the subways did get built. The 2nd Ave line was built over the past decade and is running now.

Nobody's saying it's easy. But stuff gets built all the time. Saying it's too hard in principle and couldn't happen seems demonstrably... false.

The system also doesn't have to go up all at once. Delivery app aren't going anywhere, but rather than try and implement an unproven system city wide, at impossible expense, build one residential skyscraper (which is still going to be O($100 million), mind you), and equip it with a building-sized set of dumb-waiters (public-private option, with the government providing incentives). Either to the apartment directly or even just to the right floor. See how that gets used. Delivery people still have to come to the premises, but can send the food up. Use this to figure out what level of security is needed and such.

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