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Comment by ThePadawan | Hacker News Reader

Dropping the official product FAQ that answers some (but not all) frequent question in its FAQ: https://www.cst.ch/en/faq/

My summary, having lived in Switzerland for the last 10+ years:

- Of course actual railways are more efficient. They will continue to be built where possible.

- This is a tunnel network to get the goods into the middle of cities without putting an ever increasing number of trucks onto the city streets to distribute them throughout the city.

- This runs parallel to the Alps, not through them.

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> Of course actual railways are more efficient. They will continue to be built where possible.

Wouldn't this underground network be more efficient than the above-ground railways for cargo? Cargo trains above ground need to stop at lights, need human drivers, etc etc.

> This is a tunnel network to get the goods into the middle of cities without putting an ever increasing number of trucks onto the city streets to distribute them throughout the city.

The article suggests this is to be a national network, not local. If it were just for the "last mile" wouldn't they just use above-ground trains to get the goods to the outskirts of the city before using the underground network to get them into the middle?

> Wouldn't this underground network be more efficient than the above-ground railways for cargo? Cargo trains above ground need to stop at lights, need human drivers, etc etc.

Depends on your definition of "efficient" - I imagine it's definitely more efficient to ship a cargo container full of grain than a CST pod full of grain simply because they are higher volume. If your goal however is "get cereal boxes into an urban supermarket", then cargo rail is probably less efficient, yes.

> The article suggests this is to be a national network, not local. If it were just for the "last mile" wouldn't they just use above-ground trains to get the goods to the outskirts of the city before using the underground network to get them into the middle?

I seem to have phrased it poorly then - yes, that is exactly what CST wants to do. The goal is not to replace urban truck traffic with CST.

> The goal is not to replace urban truck traffic with CST.

Though reducing that traffic is one goal.

""" In urban areas, city logistics can reduce delivery traffic by 30%. """

I guess this is achieved because deliveries get aggregated by destination in the logistical center (where they have space for such buffering), while currently many places might still receive multiple deliveries per day (depending on sender).

""" In the CST system, the goods are already sorted and bundled by destination when transported in the tunnel. This bundling process means that they are optimally prepared for the subsequent micro-distribution process. """

> Wouldn't this underground network be more efficient than the above-ground railways for cargo? Cargo trains above ground need to stop at lights, need human drivers, etc etc.

I think CST vs. cargo rail are very much complementary.

Cargo rail need huge logistical centers and rail yard for sorting, those can be outside of town. CST provide the delivery network from those logistical centers to urban areas.

In fact the first leg of CST is from the biggest swiss post logistical center (https://www.google.com/maps/@47.3197669,7.8162172,1399m/data...) to the biggest Swiss city.

>Cargo trains above ground need to stop at lights

Lol, no they don’t. Do you know how long it takes for a freight train to stop?

They might be referring to the signals on the track.

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

> Wouldn't this underground network be more efficient than the above-ground railways for cargo? Cargo trains above ground need to stop at lights, need human drivers, etc etc.

Grade separation is a thing in much of the world.

And building a country-spanning network of heavy-duty underground tunnels isn't exactly cheap, even compared to a fully grade-separated train network.

On the other hand, having a national network of tunnels built and maintained is great for when an asteroid strikes off the coast of New York and you only have a few hours to get people to safety. Handily, they're also full of supplies and battery power.

Not really.

In Cold War context, Switzerland used to mandate nuclear bunkers maintained and stocked for that purpose, they’re been decommissioning those for decades.

Starving in a tunnel is not helpful, and if you’re supposed to plan for an asteroid hitting New York directly affecting Switzerland, a network of cargo tunnels are more likely to collapse on you than save you.

Even tunnels which were built with that purpose in mind (like Lucerne’s Sonnenberg) have huge logistical problems caused by their scale.

It was a joke about disaster movies. One of them even had tunnels in its plot. There's a disaster movie set in Australia that goofs on the tendency for all asteroids to hit off the coast of New York by having the news come hours before the disaster reached them.

That FAQ answers nearly all questions I had, and where asked on this page.

Thank you for that!

Autonomous battery electrical vehicles on simple roads might be a lot cheaper, faster, simpler, and more flexible than either railway or this. This project has a high risk of being technically obsoleted by such a thing long before completion.

Switzerland has no space for additional "simple roads". It would also be extremely difficult go get it approved, as it would pass through many municipalities. You would have hundreds of objections by residents and probably also a few referendums.

I think they’re suggesting existing roads, which have their own issues (ie the presence of humans)

It also would not solve the problem which this is trying to solve, less vehicles on the road and less congestion in the cities.

Unless of course you mean to say that all vehicles on the road should be autonomous EVs before the first stages of CST are finished (sometime in the 2030s), in which case I want to congratulate you on your optimism that that would be "a lot cheaper, faster, simpler, and more flexible than either railway or this".

The main point is to get congestion out of roads and your solution is to increase congestion. Nice!

Autonomous vehicles can use existing roads more efficiently. In fact, that's the whole point of this tunneling project. Think of a tunnel as just a stupidly expensive road and you'll see that simply having autonomous vehicles without the billions of dollars of infrastructure would achieve the same goal. Simply close a few roads for normal traffic and you have the same advantages but without the tunnels and power rails. Vastly cheaper. And there already are lots of roads. So, these vehicles could go to a lot of places instead of only a select few elevators above the tunnels.

And of course you could actually mix autonomous and regular traffic as autonomous vehicles get smarter. Like is already happening in parts of the world.

Also, the main issue in cities is not tunneling into a central location but distributing goods all over the city using e.g. cargo bikes, small vans, etc. Many of those are already electric and typically operate from distribution centers on the edge of the cities. Banning regular traffic out of the cities would free a lot of space for that. Some cities are already doing that or at least strongly discouraging car traffic. E.g. London, Paris, Amsterdam, etc. have large car free zones and lots of modern electric delivery vehicles.

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