Hacker News Reader

Comment by yigithan | Hacker News Reader

Right, they can even do this for within city delivery. Imagine each home having a tube box, like a mailbox, that is vertically connected to the network of tubes underground. Small electric vehicles running through the tubes and carrying parcel from warehouse hubs to homes and even vice versa. Amazon Instant Delivery!

View on HN

They built a tunnel just for mail trains between postal offices in London in the 19th century. You can even go down there now https://www.postalmuseum.org/event/tunnel-walks/

I'm... not convinced it scales well, cost-wise!

A similar sentiment to other commenters in this thread... Why re-invent something incredibly resource-consuming like building specialized tube boxes?

If I were to invest into something today it would be medium size (about a tall van size) autonomous containers that can drive at night within city limits and drop off small reusable containers at delivery points such as apartment buildings. Case in point: Luxer One is a fairly common setup in SF today, the next step would be to stop delivering individual packages and, instead, deliver daily boxes for the whole building.

Then the first time one of those little shuttles gets stuck in the tubes you’re gonna have to start digging things up. Not to mention the bad actors that have a pipeline to deliver all kinds of dangerous things right into people’s homes or you know just mess up the pipe system completely. It’s a terrible idea. Why not just have functional drone delivery, it just makes way more sense.

funny that one of the better f u t u r e ideas in this thread got heavily downvoted. This is probably one of the more efficient ways to automate package delivery, up to a small-ish size, and requiring a pretty high density. If NY wasn't a clusterfuck when it comes to getting projects built, they might actually have the density to justify the maintenance costs.

> Small electric vehicles

why not just use pneumatics? It's a proven technology used in sufficiently large facilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube#Contemporary_us...

Afaik Estonia has something similar for their trash system

Reply on news.ycombinator.com