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Japan wants to build a cargo conveyor belt because it’s running out of drivers
- anticensor 2y agoWhy have conveyor belts instead of having more freight trains?
- lesuorac 2y agoWhat freight trains? ("In 2017, only about 5% of all freight in Japan is carried by rail ... Trucks carry about 50% and ships about 44%." [1]; "It is used relatively little for freight transport, accounting for just 0.84% of goods movement." [2]) Also it's apparently something they do. "And it’s not totally untested. The country’s Torigatayama limestone mine uses a 14-mile (23 km) belt, and in Africa a 62-mile (100 km) system moves phosphate between mine and port, SCMP notes." Personally I'd think it'd be easier to make a canal but I'm not a civil engineer. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Freight_Railway_Company#Economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Freight_Railway_Company#... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Japan
- Hooray_Darakian 2y agoI think that just changes the question to "Why belts instead of some cargo trains" then. Scheduling would no doubt be an issue, but is probably tractable.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoTokyo and Osaka are both on the ocean (although, a bit roundabout path between them). You would think it would be easier to just do more cargo ships point to point.
- m463 2y agoTrucks would be low latency, low bandwidth. Cargo ships would be high bandwidth, high latency. For example, I think trucks would be better for perishable goods.
- lelandbatey 2y agoSince both are port cities, I very much wonder why they're not stopping them by boat?
- foota 2y agoCanals would also require drivers for the boats (modulo some AI powered boats or something). I suspect the real answer here is that the report was just some exploratory thinking, and unlikely to really happen.
- bee_rider 2y agoI wonder how the ratio of people:stuff breaks down WRT boats and trucks. I’d expect trucks to be much more person intensive, but the vagaries of crew sizes and canal widths could throw that off I guess.
- lucumo 2y agoI quickly scanned the Rhine Regulations for Navigation Personnel. The tables starting on page 49 show minimum crew requirements for types of ships and operating modes: https://www.ccr-zkr.org/files/documents/reglementSTF/RPN_01012024_en.pdf https://www.ccr-zkr.org/files/documents/reglementSTF/RPN_010... It seems to go from a single boatmaster to crews of less than 10. The smallest container ships for inland shipping are about 30-ish containers; the largest about 500. A truck can do 2 containers with 1 driver. So, an inland ship can do 15-30 times as many containers per crew, compared to a truck.
- Glyptodon 2y agoIt seems like a canal with a current could have unmanned pods that behave like items on a conveyor belt. My best guess as to why a cargo belt is that maybe conveyor belts could handle slight elevation changes better than a canal.
- numpad0 2y agoThe famous Japanese rail network is incompatible with the ISO 40/20ft container spec. Surprise surprise...
- AlbertCory 2y agothat's what I was wondering, too. How is it incompatible? Wrong gauges?
- corey_moncure 2y agoJR (on which freight trains do run) network is 3/4 gauge, but JR shinkansen and other operators use standard.
- shiroiushi 2y ago>but JR shinkansen and other operators use standard. That's irrelevant. The shinkansen tracks cannot be used for cargo trains: they're exclusively for high-speed passenger trains. You can't share tracks between slow cargo trains and high-speed passenger trains. Not only is the scheduling impossible, but the cargo trains would ruin the tracks. The shinkansen tracks require frequent and thorough maintenance to keep them at the level needed for reliable high-speed service. If you want to see what happens when you try to share tracks between cargo and passengers, just take a look at Amtrak. It's a complete disaster.
- numpad0 2y agoIt's combination of tunnel ceiling height, weight limit, and chassis mounting compatibility. I'm not completely sure there were protectionism of either directions are involved with JNR/JR 12/20/31ft system and ISO 20/40ft, both seem to have been conceived around the same time in mid 60s.
- russfink 2y agoAnd why a “belt” instead of a custom rail conveyance?
- wongarsu 2y agoJapan is very mountainous, so any flat land is really valuable. The proposal seems to suggest to put the conveyor belt in highway medians or tunnels below roads. Using highway medians sounds like it should bring a lot of issues, but it's free real estate on grades a conveyor can easily handle. Running train tracks there probably wouldn't work as trains are more demanding than cars when it comes to acceptable grades and curves. If they go with tunnels the rationale of the boring company applies: the smaller the tunnel the cheaper it is to dig.
- russfink 2y agoOne more - 311 miles of airport luggage-like conveyors: would the standard cardboard box survive the many, many hops and interchanges required? Sometimes I think ideas are published so that people in forums such as HN can come up with better solutions that they then learn from.
- quartesixte 2y agoRelated question: how many miles of conveyor belt in a typical UPS/FedEx center? How many miles of belt does a box currently traverse?
- dzhiurgis 2y agoOr moving trains in a circle
- pavel_lishin 2y agoFinally, Factorio in real life.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- duskwuff 2y agoYou'd think that Japan, of all places, would prefer bots over belts.
- fhub 2y agoMy local sushi train is all about the belts.
- zht 2y agowhat does that have to do with japan?
- drekipus 2y agothe train, duh.
- salad-tycoon 2y agoExample: don’t know much about Japan other than they use chopsticks and get their food by conveyor belt in restaurants. That I do know.
- boomboomsubban 2y agoI believe the conveyor belt restaurants are fading out at least partially due to some asshole teen recording themselves drooling on a plate and putting it back on the belt.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
- ianferrel 2y agoAs Heinlein intended. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll
- swaginator 2y agoThe Roads Must Roll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll
- imfgrly 2y ago[dead]
- edaemon 2y agoReminds me of the rue de l'Avenir, a series of parallel moving walkways set at successively higher speeds, used as public transport for the 1900 Exposition in Paris. It moved a surprising amount of people. I expect this conveyor belt has a similarly high capacity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rue_de_l%27Avenir https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rue_de_l%27Avenir
- numpad0 2y agodupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40809276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40809276
- mmastrac 2y agoThis works pretty well in Factorio and Satisfactory. Low speed automated transport is pretty good for throughput, just not lag.
- golemiprague 2y ago[dead]
- richardw 2y agoIt would be interesting to know the fully baked all-externality cost of it vs alternatives. Tyre rubber, road maintenance, accidents, ship diesel, ports, people, trains, insurance. Anything removing a) complex, expensive moving parts or b) significant externalities or c) people, is a win (except for that jobs thing, but Japan has reducing population). Trains would seem the logical alternative since it touches three big cities on the route, and you could presumably enter/exit multiple places on the route. Trains can handle some interruption, by orchestrating individual vehicle groups around. Surely for this to be as effective it would need a lot of that. Eg buffers, sidings, minor re-routing around issues. Main difference is the “track” moves, not just the vehicles. So you power and manage the track and the vehicles (shipping containers?) are mostly dumb and just need to be attached to it.
- lancewiggs 2y agoLove the ambition. The auto-handing to get freight to destinations is big advantage. This is not about delivering from one end to the other, which is better done by ship, but about sending materials to and from entities within the intensively populated and industrialised region. Engineering issues include maintenance on the many rollers and other moving parts, wear and tear on the belts, uptime when maintenance is happening and general inefficiency in energy, speed and asset utilisation versus rail.
- webwielder2 2y agoOr they could allow 25,000 immigrants in with generous incentives to be truck drivers.
- brigandish 2y agoThe problem with Japan would be the word "immigrant" with a large number, and "generous incentives", which I didn't believe ever happens in Japanese companies. On a maybe more serious note, and in direct contradiction to what I would've thought and thus wrote above, according to what I've just been told (I mentioned this story to a Japanese person who works in shipping) truck drivers and bus drivers get a really good wage in Japan but still they can't attract people into the job.
- shiroiushi 2y agoThey have the same problem in America too. There's very good reasons for this: 1. Truck driving requires extensive (and expensive) training and licensing. You can't just hire some immigrants to do it for you. Driving such a large vehicle on narrow, crowded roads requires a lot of skill and training, and is very dangerous. This creates a large barrier of entry into the career. Who's going to pay for this training? 1.a. With immigrants, how do you train them when they don't speak the language? And if you train them in another language, how do they function when they can't talk to anyone they work with (customers), or the occasional police interaction? Are you suggesting that Japan needs to pay immigrants to go to language school for 2 years before starting truck-driving school? This career isn't that highly-paid. 2. Truck driving is hard on your body, particularly your back. Check out American truck drivers nearing retirement age and look at their general health. 3. Truck driving usually takes you far from home for long durations (probably not quite as bad in Japan since it's a smaller country than the US). Most people want to go home to their families after work. Face it: truck driving is a shitty job. The more it can be replaced with automation, the better.
- 8note 2y agoAccording to the Secret Life of Groceries, truckers go into debt to fund their training, and largely just take on more and more debt in order to do jobs, in the hope of paying off the debt on their truck. Nobody is paying to pay truckers for training when they can instead convince the trucker to train themselves, pay for their own truck, but be limited by contract to be an "independent contractor" that can only take on contracts for one company at a loss
- ww520 2y agoIn the world of Asimov's I Robot book, conveyor belt walkways are common transportation mechanism. The Japan conveyor belt system can ship both goods and people around.
- dadjoker 2y agoWelcome to the reality of not bearing enough children.
- recursive 2y agoIf it can be solved with conveyer belts, maybe we didn't that many children?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- salad-tycoon 2y agoWe’ve had children longer historically than conveyor belts. Therefore we need more children and not belts if we, as people, want to leave a legacy of humans instead of a legacy of literal actual real life conveyor belts. Also, this is just one symptom. If the only problem of humans being/needing to be replace by conveyor belts than, yay. Ok, maybe. But I think it’s more like the bubbles underneath paint of your ceiling or that mud tube on the outside of a house. It’s a warning sign of what’s to come and not the finality of consequences. Or maybe not, this article didn’t speak about any of that but I’d wager a 41% transport shortage is big problem for food/medicine/toilet paper etc which can only lead to problems as we just recently experienced with Covid and civil unrest. I’d also be willing to bet this will be problematic for things like house and goods price stability, hospitals, schools, whatever kind of public works they have and societal fall nets, and what about the really crappy jobs people want to do less than trucking? The exceptional quality of life that many of our countries from which we post are only possible by the lowest rung of ladder holding it all up. Not to mention that on the whole of it humans are good! We love, love, create, invent, hack, explore. Yeah there’s bad stuff too but I think the extreme comfort in which many of us finds us helps to numb us the goodness around us and we just get a thrill from the bad. At least that my argument to your stated questions and implied construction. Ie why did we need all those humans anyways, they were unnecessary and a drain. Excuse me if I assumed the later. Anyways, that’s just, like, my opinion man so maybe I’m wrong.
- 2y ago
- phkahler 2y ago"Due a lack of truck drivers" at the price they are willing to pay. So this is an optimization. That's fine. But optimized systems tend to be fragile. A belt breakdown will be less frequent that a truck problem, but will have a much larger impact.
- ars 2y ago> at the price they are willing to pay. No. They actually literally running out of people to do all the needed jobs. Japan has among the lowest birth rates in the world. They could pay more for truck drivers, and then have a shortage somewhere else. There just aren't enough people for all the jobs.
- pezezin 2y agoNot only that, but many Japanese companies are notoriously inefficient, with lots of people tasked with bullshit jobs. Maybe they could also try to optimize a bit...
- shiroiushi 2y agoYou can't just grab some random worker and hand them the keys to a truck. Truck driving requires a lot of expensive training, and it's a shitty job that not many people want to do anyway because it takes them away from home too much.
- kalleboo 2y agoIt's rather "at the level of immigration they are willing to allow"
- hanniabu 2y agowhy not dedicated a highway lane to autonomous trucks?
- recursive 2y agoI don't think that would help anything. If someone unauthorized uses the lane, what should happen? Trucks just crash into them? I don't think that will work. If they're using a lane in a road, they'll still have to solve the full hard autonomous driving problem. So then, what's the point of the lane at all?
- hanniabu 2y agoYou put a barrier up separating that lane and require a handshake with the vehicle for entrance > they'll still have to solve the full hard autonomous driving problem Not for a highway with no entrance and exits between the 2 cities > So then, what's the point of the lane at all? It won't take a decade and $20B to build
- recursive 2y agoHow will the autonomous trucks get to the protected lane? What will they do when they have mechanical problems? What will the trucks behind them do? Where will traffic go that was using that lane before? How is this better than a freight train?
- hanniabu 2y agoAll still problems with a conveyor belt
- worik 2y agoA step beyond rail. where I live politics, greed, and the stupidity of the powerful boasted trucks and crippled trains So we have an intermediate step here
- tmm84 2y agoI was thinking this when I first read about the conveyor belt proposal. Years ago, Japan cut down on the hours drivers could do because many were driving too many. So, they tried to get more drivers by making it a career path for more people. Getting licensed to drive and having a life situation where you can be on the road for days is something very few have the ability to do. Add to this the population shrinkage and aging which further hinders this. I can honestly say that this is probably the only solution that will work for this problem. As for rail freight, I think it would be a good idea but as seen with recent linear rail it may be difficult to get anything that would be purpose fulfilling in this regard (yes, Japan has commuter trains but those rails are painfully busy so moving freight is getting more difficult).
- Glyptodon 2y agoWhat makes a cargo belt more appealing/better than trains or canals? Just that it's ostensibly more automated and ostensibly needs less maintenance?
- saalweachter 2y agoI can't understand how it'd need less maintenance. A conveyer belt spreads the moving parts over hundreds of miles; with trains you can push all them cars to a yard for maintenance at a single point.
- beefnugs 2y agoYeah you would need various locations of maintenance and the ability to have swap out parts all along the path i think? The benefit of truly constant full bidirectional throughput seems to be defeated by problems somewhere along the line. Maybe distributed electrical power is a benefit somehow? Maybe this is a truly japanese only possibility, the same way vending machines dont get vandalized, maybe they dont have terrorists and vandals?
- ptelomere 2y agoThe article is misleading, I've read the actual report in Japanese. It's not trying to built Tokyo-Osaka conveyor belt, too expensive, too close the the realm of sci-fi. What they're trying to do is to use the current trucking between metropolitans -Japan is not eager to just "erase" jobs - then switch to the conveyor belt system connecting into the city. What' they're trying to build, are these switch hubs and the underground conveyor system.