Bruges Will Cut Traffic with an Underground Beer Pipeline

This is so cool, why haven't I heard it before? I'd expect to have seen it in an ad somewhere.

Excerpts of two comments on that article:

"In the past, there were two big Breweries in Copenhagen. Carlsberg and Tuborg. Carlsberg supported the sciences and Tuborg supported the arts. So, if you were a well known scientist, Carlsberg gave you free beer and if you were a well known artist, Tuborg gave you free beer."

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"The house that Niels Bohr lived in was called the Carlsberg Honor Residence (Carlsbergs Æresbolig), and was the home of people deemed worthy from 1914 to 1995, of which Niels Bohr was the most well known (he lived there 1932 to 1965).

Before Bohr it was the home of Danish philosopher Harald Høffding (he lived there 1914-1931), and after Bohr it was the home of the archaeologist Johannes Brøndsted (1963-1965), astronomer Bengt Strømgren (1967-1986), and professor in East-Asian languags Søren Egerod (1988-1995). Egerod was the last person to live there, and it is now the Carlsberg Academy."

This doesn't answer your question, but Manhattan used to have a pneumatic tube system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_Yor...

Sort of like a modern version of NYC's pneumatic tube system http://untappedcities.com/2013/03/15/nycs-pneumatic-tube-mai...

I'm sure science exists to prove me wrong, but I get nervous when I think of how much solid air exists when you start putting tunnels underneath populous cities. An earth quake or a flood would destroy that infrastructure, and the decade or so it would take to excavate and build these things would probably sour the population to the idea.

Imagine how expensive it would be to install a new system of piping throughout the city, including equipment to move the packets along and sort them at each of the junctions. And to carry physical goods, these would have to be big pipes, probably at least 50 cm in diameter.

Probably the best bet would be to piggyback on the subway system, since they already have tunnels dug. People could send and pick up packages at subway stops. And maybe subway trains could add special freight cars.

But still, we are talking major expenses, and negotiations with God knows how many slow-moving bureaucracies.

With enough population density, I feel like having a lot of package pickup points would make more sense logistically than having a pipe go to every home.

Home delivery can be the costliest part of a package ordered online.

NYC (Roosevelt Island and, it sounds like shortly, the Hudson Yards development) and a few other places have modern pneumatic solid waste transport system provided by http://www.envacgroup.com/

Powered by gym treadmills.

It's part of Scott Adams' intermittent blogging about creating an ideal new city from scratch - http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/garbage_city/

Conveyors are not scalable: they have terrible efficiency, maintenance, and capital costs. Conveyors are actually fantastically energy inefficient...worse than diesel trucks over anything longer than football field distances. Their rolling friction grows linearly with length. Furthermore, their number of moving parts grows linearly with length. And every roller added to the system has the potential to shut down the entire system...all it takes is a seized bearing. Routing efficiency is actually its strong point, which is why they are used in so many factory and logistics operations, but those are typically much smaller than manhattan.

That being said, there is definitely potential for underground logistics...but it is more likely to happen on rails or in tubes with vehicle propulsion instead of track propulsion.

I'm afraid of the security implications of another automated, hard to control, hard to see attack surface. I'm all for better infrastructure, but infrastructure is what historical comes under attack first when "shit hits the fan", and this seems like a great target and pipeline.

If you can help me make it secure, I'd love to help you design it.

This is a bit of a modernization of a perennial HN favorite: the Chicago Tunnel Company.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company

For years, a network of tunnels connected downtown Chicago buildings with a narrow gauge freight railway. It also doubled as an air conditioning duct for some buildings. Depending on who you ask, it either failed because of politics (regulation of passenger traffic, etc.) or economics (deliveries from outside the network dominated later office traffic, which had to be carried by trucks), change (the switch to natural gas instead of coal siphoned off a lot of traffic), or geography (floods).

You might be interested in [1] Food Tubes - they use pneumatic pipelines rather than conveyors, but the basic idea is similar.

I suspect you have to spend an absolute fortune before you figure out whether there's enough demand to make it profitable.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/12/want-fries-with-t...

Alternatives to transportation by car in general should see a revival, it is quite sad that the state of public transport in the 1920's was generally quite a bit better than it is today. For example Berlin used to have one of the largest tram line systems, that also had freight trams. Early industrial cities in general tend to have a much better transportation system until today. As long as the lower classes were not able to buy a car, it was actually in the interest of industrialists to pressure for investments in public infrastructure, so their workers had an efficient commute.

Now that the car industry plays a less significant role in some of the (post) industrial countries maybe there is hope to boost other forms of transportation.

Sounds like you should play Factorio.

I heard an interview with someone from the brewery on NPR. Apparently the "pipeline" is not a single pipe, but a bundle of multiple pipes, which carry additional types of liquids such as dirty water, cleaning solution, etc. to flush the actual beer-carrying pipe. Interesting setup.

Breweries use a cleaning solution in between beer transports in-house. Same principle here.

Bruges is a City in Flanders, Belgium. It's not in Germany.