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> The system, which was located 4 to 6 feet below the city streets, was created and owned by private companies, to which the city paid rent and labor. When did
by smeej 3y ago
> The system, which was located 4 to 6 feet below the city streets, was created and owned by private companies, to which the city paid rent and labor.
When did we collectively lose the idea that such a model is even possible?
- woleium 3y agoMore to the point, who owns them now and can we pull fibre through them?
- adolph 3y agoMaybe just fill a tube container with nvme and have a few USB connected channels on the end, make a little bot to plug it into compute for each step of a processing pipeline. If you move 10T in 30s that’s like 300G/s?
- woodruffw 3y agoOnly fragments exist; they don't form complete lines anymore. (Besides, these are 100+ year old iron tubes; there are much better things to run fiber through. NYC does not have a shortage of buried, half-forgotten infrastructure.)
- elahd 3y agoVerizon, actually. Not the mail tubes specifically, but they own Empire City Subway, a 130 year old company rents out sub-street conduit for telecom. Their tubes are visible when streets are dug up for construction. https://www.empirecitysubway.com/ https://www.empirecitysubway.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_City_Subway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_City_Subway Looks like their lowest rate (<=2.5" conduit) is $3,660/mile/yr, not including installation, permitting, and city franchising fees. Still interested?
- fragmede 3y agoTo be able to charge business customers $500-$1500+/month for 10-gig and run an IPX? Sounds cheap!
- huytersd 3y agoI don’t understand it. What did the city rent? What was the profit sharing like? Did the private companies keep all the profits and the city footed the bill for maintenance, support and upkeep?
- ethbr1 3y agoThis is turn of the century New York. Someone was getting paid from government accounts. ;-) >> “The high operating costs of the pneumatic system ultimately proved its downfall. By 1918, the federal government considered the annual rental payments ($17,000 per mile per annum) made by the post office to be ‘exorbitant’ and endorsed a new alternative with greater capacity–the automobile–as the delivery method of choice.”
- smeej 3y agoI'm about as interested in the creation. Did people just go down and install them? Was this an "ask forgiveness, not permission" scenario? If not, how did they get the permission of everyone above? Or how deep do land rights even go? I ask this partially too because most of the highways in my state were originally privately funded and built, and only later funded by government fees. I just wonder what happened to the "let's just go do it" mentality of rallying people to cooperate and getting things done. Almost seems like it would be hard to do worse than the current bureaucratic nightmares.
- IIAOPSW 3y agoPublic private partnership. The city doesn't have the funds up front, so it contracts the work out but part of the payment is a monopoly on running the service for some number of years. This is how the subway was built using the dual contracts (IRT and BMT). Basically the city paid contractors to build the subway, and paid for it in part by letting them run the subway and collect fares.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]