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What problem is this system trying to solve? It seems to be, in this initial deployment, that the office park is too far away from the restaurants its employees want to visit, compelling them to drive there. I feel like a better solution would be permitting denser and mixed-use development, so employees can walk to their favorite restaurants on the ground floor instead of driving >1km to them or paying for a delivery tunnel.

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I feel like comments like this always come up. Basically reducing it to, why not just become Manhattan?

They want a solution for today, not decades from today which is what urban planning would take. But also they likely want the neighborhood they built/moved to. They don’t want to live in a super dense mixed use plaza. They also want solutions that the plethora of communities like theirs can replicate. They just want a little upgrade to their bucolic life. They don’t want to hit the reset button. It seems way more reasonable to upgrade than try to reinvent it.

Classic straw man argument, there's a pretty big difference from a walkable and incrementally more dense neighborhood and Manhattan.

We're not going to tear down and rebuild everything all at once, it's going to take time and work to get us out of the massive car dependent hole we've dug for ourselves. It seems Atlanta has massively oversupplied (to it's own detriment) parking and prioritized space for cars, and neglected to consider that cities depend on attracting a sufficent density of humans.

https://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2022/07/11/atlanta-...

> Studies conducted prior to the pandemic indicate that only 30% of nearly 100,000 parking spaces in Downtown Atlanta are used during peak hours.

There’s nothing straw man about it, it’s reality of suburbanite life.

I’ve worked in “walkable” office parks and have the time the guys at the office would get in a car and still drive elsewhere. It doesn’t solve for the overall problem.

The only way to actually eliminate the drive-to-a-place problem is dense Manhattanesque cities where vehicles are prohibitive for the average Joe and robust public transit exists to allow Joe to make a quick jaunt down the road.

Your quote only adds to the GP's point -- Atlanta is so far from being walkable that it will take half a century of very good urban planning before the problem solved by the article is solved in the way that would make the r/fuckcars posters that show up in every thread on this site about transportation would like it to be.

People arguing that Atlanta should just permit "denser and mixed-use development, so employees can walk to their favorite restaurants on the ground floor instead of driving >1km" as a short-term solution to the massive sprawl that is Atlanta have absolutely no idea of the gargantuan undertaking they are proposing and it's sort of ironic that they propose that undertaking as an "easier" solution to the problem than the one in the article.

I think it's telling that the person who made this comment used km -- it's obvious they are not American, and know very little about Atlanta or about the suburbs around it or how people live there. I, on the other hand, have first-hand experience.

Don't ask me about it though, I don't read replies to my comments on this hellsite

I'm American and have lived most of my life in American suburbs. I don't like them very much, and I don't like the imperial system.

I don't think denser development is a short term solution, but I don't like short term solutions either. Short term planning is part of what made traffic in cities like Atlanta so bad. And IMO it seemed like a fair suggestion because extending these tunnels to every house in suburban Atlanta wouldn't be a short process either.

Atlanta as a metropolitan area should not be used to set a bar for walkability. It is a massive city. Instead, one should take neighborhoods and start there. Atlanta certainly has walkable neighborhoods, what it lacks is efficient infrastructure to get from one neighborhood to another.

Most people move to Atlanta for the burbs! They move away from dense cities like Manhattan to have a yard and some space, without having to pay a lot of money for it, but still be close enough to the city.

But the jobs are all in the city, and they all want to drive in, which is why traffic sucks and midtown/downtown is one big parking lot.

I don’t think they all want to drive in. There’s no choice. For instance if you live in Gwinnett you have to commute to doraville for rail— it’s not a giant time save if at all any time save. They said it would take 30 years to get heavy rail to Duluth at a minimum ! Maybe my grandkids could benefit.

There’s also missing Marta stops such as Atlantic station, Cobb galleria, and ponce city market. Using the buses seems to be the short term work around but it is rather absurd.

Yeah, 5 minutes outside in the summer heat would change their mind on that. Walk even a few blocks in August and you a shower.

It's not mutually exclusive, we can implement this while working on urban planning/re-design since that takes so long. But, we should start that in places already primed for it, like the straw man you mentioned, Downtown Atlanta parking lots.

You don't need to become Manhattan to have density and mixed-use? I used to work at a place with a restaurant next to it (allowed by a reduction of parking minimums). Guess where a lot of my fellow employees are?

Maybe I am missing something — But what problem is it really solving? They want a hamburger quicker? I personally enjoy the dichotomy between the burbs and city personally especially in Atlanta.

I don’t think quicker is necessarily the motivation. But currently they’re likely using DoorDash which requires a human and a very large automobile so I think it’s an optimization of that. It may also be quicker since it can more effectively work in parallel

It seems to me like the delivery bots you may see around some places. Except those things are pretty slow and I feel like they’re always involved in accidents with automobiles.

It’s less than a mile. Just build a nice bike lane / footpath.

I think automation is a particular motivation of this project.

If something like this is financially viable (doubt) then it sounds like the density already exists and the problem is the restaurants aren't near the people. All the replies are focused on the density you mentioned but mixed use is probably the bigger and far more easily solved problem.

Letting restaurants open nearby to where there are clearly a lot of people is a tried and proven solution, not gadgetbhan for food.

And/or encouraging more use of things like bikes. I'd bet that painting a bike lane and putting up concrete barriers is cheaper than trenching out a three-quarter mile pseudo-pneumatic-tube-system.

Have you spent any time in Atlanta in August? Biking outside is not just biking, but also swimming - through the humidity. I don't mind it (avid all-season mountain biker) but most office workers wouldn't opt for that in their fancy office clothing just for a sandwich.

Seems to work fine for singapore / dc.

Everything is closer in Singapore meaning longer distances (which is the key, a build environment for humans, not cars, first).

I think it's hard to say things are fine when there's still huge gender disparities, in DC area it's something like 2:1

What does gender have to do with anything in this discussion?

> in DC area it's something like 2:1

That's not true.

33% of bike trips in the Washington area are by women. Assuming non-binary people are around 1% of trips, that puts men at 66%, giving an exact 2:1 ratio

Source: https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/24356/dot_24356_DS1.pdf?

And IMO you can't call a mode of transportation "fine" when large swathes of the population don't feel safe or comfortable using it (this comes up a lot when I talk to female friends about bus/metro usage too)

Thank you for clarifying, I get what you mean now.

That study is over a decade old though. And I would think that there's too many confounding variables at play there. IMO the biggest confounder is "society issues" that make women feel less safe in general in public spaces. In my local neck of the US, I pretty much never see solo women eating outside at night, vs solo men and mixed groups.

This might have been true during WW II when flat feet and myopia did not exempt men from conscription. It has not, that I know of, been true any time in the last seventy years. I moved to the area forty-five years ago. This was not because I supposed that the 5:1 ratio (which some mentioned) would make women overlook my mediocre looks, shabby clothes, and so-so hygiene; but the chance it could be true seemed like a bonus.

As an Asian being sweaty in the summer is the worst part. My dad grew up in Bangladesh (in a village with no AC) and now even Maryland is too much for his taste.

Seems solvable with an e-bike or other micro-mobility options. "You're not made of sugar, you won't melt."

that's not how sun and humidity work. you're going to melt just by virtue of not being in the shade, let alone AC.

Peachtree City has tons of golf cart lanes. Really a good solution for the problem.

I'll never understand these sort of objections to convenience in favor of density. This is awesome and I can see it being a utility similar to water pipes or electricity going to a house for the same reason we all have mailboxes. Delivery is convenient and this could make it cheap and fast.

I'm not objecting to convince in favor of density because there isn't a choice to be made between the two. You can have convenience in low or high density development. The difference is in cost and complexity; high density development has all the convenience with fewer delivery costs

What's the cost of rebuilding our existing tangible cities for density? Is that without complexity? What about consideration for time?

It's not as easy as hitting "new game" on Sim City

On this small scale, rebuilding would likely be more expensive than this tunnel. But extending this network to every home would be (IMO) on the same order of magnitude as redevelopment in cost, complexity, and time. Redevelopment is complicated during construction but this system is also complicated forever. Our cities are already being rebuilt piece-by-piece every day; I'd just like zoning laws to permit rebuilding with mixed use and higher density development

It seems like it would always be small scale, just replicated. I don’t think they’re trying to long distance delivery through this. Like if wanted a pizza from 100 miles away, I’d not expect that to be supported.

I’m seeing it like a LAN. Which is how most of America is built. Clusters of businesses supported by surrounding area of residential. Any interconnection would likely benefit from batched movement into the node (cargo truck) then items go into this as a last mile solution.

> high density development has all the convenience with fewer delivery costs

This seems intuitively true, but is it true?

Is food delivery cheaper in Manhattan than in some sleep midwest suburb?

In some sleepy suburb you must pay for food delivery or hop in your car and drive to the restaurant. In Manhattan you could pay for delivery or skip delivery altogether and walk to one of the half-dozen (at least) restaurants on your block.

I live in London, and it’s very walkable and dense here compared to most US cities. Nevertheless, almost every vehicle is a delivery vehicle of some kind. Uber Eats deliveries and Amazon packages going everywhere all the time.

Some sort of city-wide underground packet switched (literally) delivery network sounds sadly impractical but would be amazing and take a huge amount of traffic off the road.

The answer to this is actually very simple and used all over the world by shopping centres and shopping district associations. You just run a free loop bus for a few hours during lunch time to bring people to and from the shopping district. Even in the US I have seen airport hotels do this in NY, SF and LA. I wonder why the default answer in US is often not simple public transport.

Because most public transit simply isn't profitable

Why would it need to be profitable? It's _public_ transport, paid for by public funds.

Exactly this. It's generally a service with positive externalities. Also this specific use case (lunchtime bus loops) exists in many parts of the world and they are clearly value creating overall otherwise shopping centres and districts wouldn't be running them.

> their favorite restaurants on the ground floor instead of driving >1km to them

There may be a restaurant on the ground floor but your favorite one might still be >1km away.

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