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I don’t understand why we don’t have delivery tunnels
by danr4 3y ago
I don’t understand why we don’t have delivery tunnels
- thefurdrake 3y agoYou mean like a city-wide pneumatic tube setup? Seems kinda Jetsons to me.
- Gasp0de 3y agoBecause digging tunnels is an absurd amount of work?
- baq 3y agoWe still do it for cables, water and sewage?
- ccozan 3y agoThat is a very interesting idea: to build small tunnels / raise along the side walk/streets for small robots/drones. It even does not need to be a tunnel: a covered trench, 50cmx50cm , would do the trick.
- pbhjpbhj 3y agoWe have tunnels (in cities in the UK), they're called storm drains. Using such tunnels for deliveries when it's raining would be right out. However when cycle lanes are put in, alongside them we could have delivery-bot lanes, maybe? Although if you have to install infrastructure then it might be as well to go full Futurama and have giant vacuum-delivery tubes.
- quickthrower2 3y agoWhat about using the road as the bot delivery lane, using an electric van as the bot? The MVP could be a diesel van with a human driver :-)
- quickthrower2 3y agoAll of which use max 10cm diameter pipes at the source. You need to 10x that (100x area) to delivery stuff.
- ben-schaaf 3y agoSimilar things have existed like the Chicago Tunnel Company or the London Post Office Railway.
- schoen 3y agoYeah, they were actually kind of practical, at least for some products and geographies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube#Historical_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube#Historical_use I remember seeing a big one of these built at the CCC Congress. It had some bugs but people were able to use it to send capsules all over the convention center. It was a cool steampunk alternate future kind of experience.
- op00to 3y agoNYC does have delivery tunnels! Or tunnel, probably. There’s a tunnel in manhattan under 9th avenue that connects the Morgan postal sorting facility to the Farley post office!