I've always wanted a world in which pneumatic tubes played a bigger role - as they used to with mail in London and Paris. It used to be possible to get a letter

I've always wanted a world in which pneumatic tubes played a bigger role - as they used to with mail in London and Paris. It used to be possible to get a letter in 4 hours. I was walking down a street the other day, early morning, and it stank with food scraps, garbage - it was one of those maintenance streets you find at the back or sometimes even the front of fast food outlets, delis and cafes. The backend of that industry looks unappealing and smells as bad even though the businesses and city are doing everything they can to keep it organized. With pneumatic tube rubbish disposal - which already exists - it would improve the quality of a large portion of the city, not to mention those children wouldn't have had to suffer. More generally as I see it we are in the Dark Ages of underground tunnel making but if it could be made 1000x affordable lots of problems start to go away for our infrastructure. I've seen The Boring Company's proposals of course but I suspect it's on the wrong track. What you want is a creation capable of creating a criss-cross of tunnels - a whole network (similar to dark fiber, just waiting for land development so it can be turned on) which is deep beneath any other infrastructure and is linked to the surface through vertical channels e.g. a connection to somebody's house goes up, not across as we assume pipes are supposed to. I think the cost of extra pump power would be as nothing to getting rid of every legal and utility availability headache!