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Underground Freight Networks
morphovar writes "The German Ruhr University of Bochum is conducting experiments with a large-scale model for an automated subterranean transport system. It would use unmanned electric vehicles on rails that travel in a network through pipelines with a diameter of 1.6 meters, up to distances of 150 kilometers. Sending cargo goods through underground pipelines is anything but new — see this scan of a 1929 magazine article about Chicago's underground freight tunnel network (more details). Translating this concept to the 21st century would be something like introducing email for things: you could order something on the Internet and pick it up through a trapdoor in your cellar the next morning."
you insensitive clod!
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Did someone get ahold of an old Popular Mechanics or something?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Meh. By the time they get something like this up and running, home fabbing will probably be very viable anyway.
Je me fous du passé
Many large cities in the US had a Pneumatic Telegraph at one time. Basically one of those pneumatic tube package delivery systems, but spanning the whole city. This was back in the 1800's. The more things change, the more things stay the same.
Does that mean I could get a U-boat through the U-bend?
I've had the theme tune to Quantum Leap going through my head all day... Now you have, too!
I hear that Harriet Tubman has experience with this sort of thing.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
I'm sorry, but that's just a dumb analogy. Email isn't overnight or even fast, it's nigh instantaneous. How about "overnight shipping for free" or something else that doesn't involve breaking it down into bits?
How about the security implications? Hack the system, free stuff. Or, mail a bomb to your ex.
The postal system is more secure because people are constantly in the loop.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
From the article: "Note that pneumatic systems could deliver physical objects, which is hard to do with email..."
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
Besides the coolness factor, why is it worth the money to have it underground?
Just hope that a shipment of spam doesn't clog your tubes :)
this would be great target for terrorists, especially if it's your society's major delivery network. a few well-placed ticking bombs would bring you down. it ain't 1929 no more.
Nice fantasy - we can't even get fiber to the home let alone deliver things to your cellar.
Something about the $200 bucks I spent for a plumber to roto-rooter the tree roots out of my drain this week makes me think this is a very bad idea!
As a side note, roots that are growing in your sewer are not the best smelling things in the world.
This would be such an amazing improvement over the current state of affairs, where I can order something on the Internet and pick it up through a front door in my living room the next morning.
I read Usenet for the articles.
This system wouldn't work in Florida or any other place where the water table is actually above ground. That is of course unless they feel like spending tons of extra money making this tunnel system able to survive in local conditions. It's okay though at some point here we'll get started on that high speed rail we voted into our constitution 12 years ago. After that we can vote this in as well...
I believe you mean Aperture Science Vital Apparatus Vent.
Even if this were practical for large businesses like the old pneumatic tube system in NYC, there is no way it would be practical for someone to dig it out to every home in the area for a handful of deliveries per month at the most. Digging tunnels is expensive and time consuming.
The best you could hope for is to have it dug to the basement of a large apartment complex.
I read the internet for the articles.
This sounds a lot like a retooled vacuum tube system. While these were very popular years ago, they have gone out of style aside from banks and other niche markets because the number of tubes can easilly get out of control, and the infrastructure is costly compared to other solutions.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
It's not a big truck, it's a series of tubes!
A few days ago, Scott Addams was exporing this same idea in a post on the Dilbert Blog. I suppose he must have been reading TFA.
Denver International Airport tried something along that line.
Things went so badly that when they sent camera equipped luggage to trouble shoot the system, they lost their camera equipped baggage. Forever.
United finally abandoned the system a few years ago, though they're still paying for it.
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
I wonder how much alcohol was smuggled through those underground tunnels in Chicago during prohibition.
With all the autonomous abilities of today's robots, and the steady increase thereof, I think it is finally time that something like this is viable.
I was thinking about this same problem recently - that of small-scale, or personal delivery of goods - however I completely overlooked the notion of underground transport. My manner of thinking centered around car-sized blimps hopping from rooftop to rooftop in a large metropolitan area, but this idea quickly became problematic as I realized that weather was a big problem for these floating robots.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
New meaning for backdoor?
...running under the Chicago river were weakened by construction crews back in '92. It collapsed and flooded most of the basements in the Loop, the city evacuated most of downtown.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Flood/
I was working across the street from the Art Institute at the time and it was a surreal thing to go down into the street and seeing all of the buildings empty out.
Too bad the Chicago tunnel system is long abandoned. I always thought it was cool. It seems like a lot of infrastructure to have in place but never use. I wonder if it can be upgraded to handle this new automated system.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
A huge network of tubes! He probably even has a name for it. internet?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The good old underground London Post Office tube...
Apparently a contractor was doing work driving pilings into the river bed near one of the bridges, and in the process they damaged the roof of one of the tunnels where it went under the river. Chicago's system had been largely abandoned, but it still connected into subbasements of buildings all over downtown. It shut down downtown for days. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Flood
The post says:
Translating this concept to the 21st century would be something like introducing email for things: you could order something on the Internet and pick it up through a trapdoor in your cellar the next morning."
Suuuure... Let's dig up the ENTIRE NATIONS SIDEWALKS and install delivery tubes to all the houses. I want to live in a city / suburb / town / village where thousands of people are digging vast pits and ditches that will deliver Consumer Goods from China (tm) to my door. Brilliant. Imagine the noise. As if it's not going to simply fill up with water and become just another sewer. As if the planet has enough energy to build such a pointless network much less constantly propel all these Consumer Goods 24/7.
Fuck, when will people get a clue that the world is better off with fewer but BETTER technologies, than more crappier technologies? and how will we tell you might ask... energy costs will certainly be a defining currency.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Although I can understand picking a modest diameter, this network will only be valuable if it minimizes the handling costs at each end. That implies picking a size that permits efficient multi-modal shipments without repacking the containers. Otherwise the labor for handling the freight would far far exceed any energy cost savings.
The "best" solution might be a 20' or 40' TEU-compatible form factor (e.g. the trailer boxes seen on ocean-going ships). This would require a tunnel with an inside diameter of at least 3.6 m, but would let goods be quickly moved from ship to tube to truck.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Those tunnels could carry far more bits per second in blue ray dvds than e-mail. And with just an few hours latency.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Most large scale transportation technologies/systems have been developed with the military in mind, so an equivalent here would be appropriate.
1. Roads - Built to make cross-country marching faster (The Romans could project force rapidly with their road systems, keeping rebellion in check for centuries)
2. Freeways - Built to be an even FASTER way to get things across country for the military (see the Autobahn, for example, it was one of the most effective force multipliers the germans had)
3. Airplane - The military has funded development of technologies like turbines, rockets, supersonic flight, GPS, and more.
and so on. Same w/ computers, for that matter.
So what's the military usage of this technology? On the surface, moving supplies and ammunition between cities to bolster defense would be an obvious one. Could cargo pods be fitted to move soldiers too? If the air is pumped out of the tubes to reduce friction, tremendous speeds would be possible.
I thought the first rule of Freight Club is that you aren't supposed to talk about it?
Tunnels are not so good for moving solid items. There are just too many logistical and physical problems. Every foot of tunnel is a potential point for derailments and jams. Not too bad for a short tunnel, but if you have hundreds of miles, the chances of a jam get quite high. And jams take a lot of time and effort to clear. And think of the logistical problems of shuttling off loads at intermediate places.
The system under Chicago was abandoned, which gives you some idea how impractical it was.
As a sidenote, a few years ago the old Chicago tunnels flooded, flooding many business places that had long ago forgotten their basements had openings to these tunnels.
This would have happened already if it made economic sense. We already have freight networks above ground. For long-haul freight, this system would have to acquire rights-of-way and then build. Since traditional rail freight is actually a money-making system for the rail roads, why would they want to disturb their existing operations? Maybe if they could add carrying capacity without disturbing track, they would do it, but it's a heck of a lot easier to add another car, and if there are too many cars add another locomotive, and if the train is too long add another run, and if your trackage can't support that many runs, add more track; but I haven't heard any stories about freight lines running out of track. If they did, trucks would just pick up the slack.
OK, enough about the long-haul freight. Most people in the US already own passenger vehicles and/or small trucks which they use for short-haul freight of smaller items. If you need something that won't fit in your car or SUV, then a bigger truck can bring it right to your door. The infrastructure, once again, is all in place.
Better yet, you can usually be sure that a truck is not just going to show up unless you ordered something. If some random package gets mis-routed to your basement, then what? What if somebody spams bombs?
Oh. And we're all going to dig up our yards and streets, in a massive undertaking to duplicate an existing system?
No. It's just not going to happen.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Recycled from trash, etc.
Actually, I think that fabbing is going to run into the same "intellectual property" felgercarb that music and video is running into. As far as I know, the only physical objects with copyright hinderances on them are buildings (not sure about china patterns, and silverware).
Right now, there are patents. Are there fair use clauses for patents? If I download a fabbing pattern from a foreign source, am I breaking patent law, or breaking import law? If I scan an object and distribute a fabbing pattern, have I broken patent law? What if I fab something I saw in a TV show, is that a copyright violation, a trademark infringement, or a patent violation? If a beautiful young female made off with one of my silverware fabbing patterns can I say that the dish ran away with the spoon?
I think we may look back on the halcyon days of yore when we only had the RIAA to deal with.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The first thing that one must ask, after ohh-ing and ahh-ing over the fantastic concept, is 'Why did this fail in the past?' Because really great ideas in city planning are never new, and have always been tried before. If it is still around, then it worked. If not, then it was abandoned because it didn't work. Why?
This mini-tunnel concept was done in Paris about 100 years ago. Small packages were delivered around the city using compressed air in a long series of tubes. It was abandoned by the late 1960s.
Tunnels have problems. Especially in the middle of cities. The buildings are high and the foundations are deep. The tunnels have to be deeper. And their sides re-enforced.
How are you going to keep the water out of them?
What do you do when they become obstructed by cave-in or automated-container collisions?
Who's going to pay for all this?
Who's going to pay to fix it in twenty to fifty years when it becomes known that massive amounts of money were stolen during the initial construction phase? (like the 'big dig' in Boston).
One of the great things about being a student of German history is to watch them meticiously design, craft, and build an elaborate 'solution' and then blow it all up in a fit of Wagnerian madness. Then pick up the pieces, go back into 'DeutscheKraftwerk' (not a real word but a real concept) mentality, and begin the whole process all over again with a new generation purified by fire and the triumph of the will. While the rest of the world just watches and feels sorry for their neighbors.
Who would need car bombs when you could just ship one to underneith someone's house or building...
Whit the whole world using containers that wouldn't be a nice choice.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
I have already formed HamsterGram LLC, a company that sends messages by tying them to the back of hamsters and then letting them loose in the giant network of empty fiber-optic conduits that cross the United States.
Routing is easy, as different hamsters have been trained to prefer different types of food - Chicago hamsters prefer pizza, New York hamsters prefer vended hotdogs, Wisconsin hamsters prefer sharp cheddar, etc.
To solve the last mile problem I have issued them all armored hamster balls, so if you see one rolling down the street for the sake of your car I'd recommend avoidance.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
a family of rats with a side order of cockroaches, please?
I don't see any foot icon...
The idea that this would work in the U.S anywhere besides 'big cities' is funnier than a rubber crutch. We can't even bury utilities.
Mod post funny.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
When I first saw the title "Underground Freight Networks", I almost went into a panic that my supply chain of stolen computers and dope had been discovered. It's good to RTFA.
The Ted Stevens Memorial Intertubes
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
MailRail, in London, came closest to the proposed system. Little automated electric trains carried mail since 1928. It was shut down in 2003. (It's still intact, though; it might be restarted some day.)
MailRail gives a sense of the constraints of a realistic system. The tunnels are 9 feet in diameter and double-tracked, so it's possible to get repair crews and equipment into the tunnels without much trouble. For small-tube systems, breakdowns are tough to deal with. MailRail was a railroad in miniature, with stations, sidings, switches, repair shops, and work trains. Even rails wear out and have to be reground or replaced, so MailRail had the gear to do "maintenance of way" work. All those things are needed, and many of them are labor intensive.
The operating cost on MailRail was quite high, even though all the capital costs had long since been paid for. Cost was 3x to 5x the cost of using trucks. But the real problem was that it didn't go to the right places; over the decades, post offices had been moved to locations off the MailRail line, and only three of the nine stations were still in use.
The Chicago tunnel system had a different problem. It was designed when long-haul freight was by rail and local delivery was horse-powered. Bear in mind that trains were routinely hauling heavy loads by 1850, but trucks didn't appear until the 1920s and didn't work well until the 1930s. (1920s trucks had power comparable to that of a small car today.) So for a seventy-year period, local delivery was badly matched to long-haul transport. Early attempts to deal with this problem involved breeding very large horses. This was the period of pneumatic tubes, underground freight rail systems, and similar attempts to fix the local delivery problem. Once truck engines and drivetrains become powerful enough to do the job, those local delivery systems were no longer needed.
"In the apartment buildings on Roosevelt Island, residents drop their trash down chutes, and it gets sucked at nearly 60 miles per hour through 20-inch underground pipes that run more than a half-mile up the island. After arriving at the ground floor of a gray three-story building at the north end of the island, the trash is compacted to about one-twentieth of its original size, sealed in a container and trucked to landfills outside the state." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/19/nyregion/19trash.html
Speaking of automated networks for distributing physical goods: Pneumatic tubes used to be "the future," and were actually pretty popular for a while. Some buildings were wired pretty well with pneumatic tubes, and there was talk about running them to every house and receiving and sending your mail, etc. through them. This never happened, and I believe the main reason it didn't was that, at the time, there was no such thing as automated switching that could work quickly enough. The pneumatic tube systems that were installed mostly had a point-to-point continuous tube for each route. For a bigger, more complex system where they couldn't do a point-to-point separate tube for every point, the switching station was a big hub where all the tubes thunked out and operators read a written label for where each one was going and went and stuck it into the right tube.
Of course, these days, all the technology for a managed packet switching network is dirt cheap. (Well, except for the pneumatic physical switches, but that's just an engineering problem.) These days, a pneumatic tube network could just have something like an RFID in each tube that gets the destination written to it, which gets read well before each switch as it flies along, so the switch is flipped before it arrives, and the packages never need to slow down. We really could do an automated system for the delivery of physical goods, and receive and send mail, order stuff from the convenience store, etc. I'm sure if a network like this existed in big cities, all sorts of businesses would build connected hubs, so you could order small stuff from Amazon and Best Buy and Walmart, etc., online and have it show up in your tube box in an hour or whatever.
It would probably also have the side benefit that a lot more small electronics would be shock rated. And a whole lot of goods would be in (presumably round) packaging that just fit in a tube. I imagine milk and cereal would all come in cylindrical packaging like a tube of quaker oats. But alas, it's one of those directions we just didn't take. An automated physical delivery system is just one of many places where maybe a lot of money on R&D and infrastructure could have gone that way, but it just never quite fell into place and worked out. It could be cool, though. Just because it's pneumatic, it doesn't have to end up like Brazil.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Except they run above ground and are called railways. And it is way cheaper to dig the holes for railways. There aren't any!!! Hah!, ha ha ha! This is just another way for others to spend our money in unneeded ways because it seems cool.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Denver International Airport tried something along that line.
Things went so badly that when they sent camera equipped luggage to trouble shoot the system, they lost their camera equipped baggage. Forever.
Maybe the lizard people wanted a nice camera.The Royal Mail had its own miniature underground system in London, used to ferry the post between the capital's various sorting offices - quite surprised they weren't mentioned in the blurb even if they did take their inspiration from the Chicago system.
:)
Don't think this idea would have much traction for individual deliveries though - tunnels are farkin' expensive, especially when you're going underneath stuff that's already been built over the top. Regional/district depots though, yes. Bit like a postal service sorting office then
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway
On a related note, those of you who've seen Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere will already have seen lots of the tunnels.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
The "last mile" network to individual addresses is unnecessary, even if it would be super cool. Just a proper packet switched freight network backbone among city/county centers would be totally worth the investment in digging and operating it. Once packages are zipped among the centers, regular delivery methods could carry it the last mile to the recipient. Properly scheduled, US Mail and private carriers, as well as smaller couriers can all handle the traffic promptly.
This kind of project could be an excellent opportunity for public/private investment. The Federal government could run the overall project as interstate commerce, with the in-state infrastructure produced by the each state itself, including its terminals and switches, according to the standards and specs of the overall project. Existing carriers like FedEx, UPS or even smaller ones could help pay for infrastructure that will subsidize their business, in exchange for discounts on access to it when it opens - carriers contributing only later can pay a higher rate, or wait for the project to recoup its investment after a while. The US Mail could be an "anchor carrier". Any shortfall in funding could be made up by the public like any other infrastructure (like highways and bridges above ground that get public access). But the key would be government initiative and coordination to ensure open access on commercially equal terms.
Then let the carriers themselves operate their freight. Let them pay for the vehicles that run on the network, and operating them remotely. Let the government own the "natural monopoly" of the single tunnel system, but let competitors run their own cars and strategies to offer services on it. That will keep the costs down eliminating redundancy, while preserving competition among the actual services that will balance costs and quality of service.
And when it finally throws the US into 21st Century mass transit for freight, let's start converting our passenger rail to packet switched networks, too. And then let's convert our regular roads, the ones with heavy point-to-point-to-point commuter traffic flows at least, to rails between the points carrying cars that get switched across the larger system. And then drive the last mile on regular roads with much greater efficiency.
Packets for all my friends!
--
make install -not war
From my old housing driving to LAX during the day, 4-6 hours, driving to LAX at 2am, 47 minutes.
If the cities started putting pressure on companies to do most of their business at night, traffic congestion would not be an issue.
Of course having the UPS guy ringing the doorbell at 3am might piss you off, unless he's bringing your latest order from Newegg.
As if someone would try to dig a tunnel under my basement. First the cost would be prohibitive (you think the last mile in fiber is hard?). Second, I'd like to know how they propose to keep it dry. I can hardly keep my basement dry, I'd hate to see another few feet down.
The network's value depends on its target market. If the market is bulk deliveries, then yes, using a standard container is probably better. If, on the other hand, the market is store-to-consumer delivery (Parcel Post, UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc) unlikely as that may be, then a smaller container may be more valuable, since those methods already have labor costs, and could likely cut labor costs down by not needing the fleet of delivery drivers wasting time and fuel while sitting in traffic. However, the cost in building such a "tube-to-the-premises" system is probably so high that this ranks up there on the silly idea meter right next to the "5,000mph mag-lev train in a vacuum tube under the atlantic for passenger transport" idea that discovery did a show on a couple years ago.
My biggest gripe is that we've gutted the rail system here in the US in favor of long-haul trucking. With multi-modal capability, there's no reason we can't use trains for the long hauls between major cities, and trucks for regional deliveries, with a fairly easy transition between the two (shipping containers have been standardized for decades, the equipment and process has been figured out already). A working passenger rail system would be nice as well, but government involvement with AMTRAK has proven pretty disastrous outside of a few areas.
Living on the side of a hill means I have had to add drainage and a small pump to prevent water intrusion.
Blar.
Things didn't go so well the last time I tried this. My cellar trapdoor was sore for a week. The Internet is scary.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I've wondered about the practicality of newer robotic technology in the construction of what I call mole tunnels for precisely this sort of thing, the idea that there will be minimal local disruption in the construction. To put in subways, you're talking about opening up the street to build the tunnel, then paving it over. Horribly disruptive. What I was thikning of is digger machines that have a small diameter like they're talking about. Dig out the tunnel and use a quick-setting concrete to construct a load-bearing tube along the way. Inertial navigation would keep the tunnel going along the predetermined track, ground-penetrating radar would avoid undocumented obstructions along the way. When the tunnel is complete, robotic automated vehicles could handle delivery of goods.
The analogy I was thinking of here is like the minimally invasive surgery doctors are performing these days -- sure, it's easier to crack the patient's chest open and look at what you're doing but it's very painful for the patient and creates a massive wound that requires a long time to heal. The minimal invasive technique only leaves behind a small incision where the camera and tools were inserted, far less trauma.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Frankly, I'm not too fond of the idea of walking down into my cellar every morning with a shovel to scoop out all the mystery meat that showed up during the night...
What if this weren't a hypothetical question?
Very very very expensive. Overground is cheap in comparison. Very very cheap and it's still very very expensive.
You'll notice we don't have a national network of underground roads or rail. Basically, not going to happen, not on a national scale anyway. Fully automated packetized transport for goods and people is pretty much going to happen one way or another though:
e.g.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7hgipbHBK8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERdF0FK-2io&feature=related
Deleted
No need for costly infrastructure or building permits. Airborne drones would be perfect for small to medium sized packages delivered to your front door or dropbox. Plus you can link the frame work with technolgy already in placed like Google maps and GPS tracking.
I'll get right on that. Right after I finish laying fiber to the curb.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
DIA used an optical system of identification.
I suspect that DIA could have modified their infrastructure to handle RFID tags and it would have worked.
Thanks to DARPA's challenges, we are now getting much closer to developing autonomous vehicles -- deliverbots -- which can safely travel on city streets. Working prototypes were made with just a couple of million dollars by dedicated teams in 18 months. For a tiny, tiny fraction of the budgets of systems like this, we could get them to the level that people will trust them on the streets. (They'll pass the "school of fish" test -- you can't even touch or hit one if you try.)
The army wants deliverbots to move cargo in a war zone at no risk to a soldier. But the civilian world will make much better use of them, if it is willing to. Quick delivery of objects is just a simple first step. Unlike this scheme it requires no new infrastructure, no public funding or right of way. And when it gets to driving people, we can solve the worst problem that basic engineering can solve -- one that kills a million people prematurely every year. A million people.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
He told me in our state (Florida) the soil was usually too porous to build a basement in, and the risk of flooding was extremely high.
Most houses I've seen here don't have a basement, it's a surprise when I see one.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Chicago's system is now used for power lines, phone and data
So, a person os going to dig to the tunnel, crack it open and then....what? The drop in air pressure will stop the pneumatics. Someone will notice.
This is easy to raise the bar to the point where almost nobody will try, and those that do will get caught.
You can't mail a bomb to your ex for the same reason you can't now.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
(Yeah, I *know*!)
haha, that's classic.
I suggest they add a tracking system next time. Like a bright strobe light and a loud beeping sound.
OTOH:
"with traditional baggage handlers manually handling cargo and passenger luggage."
hmm. I wonder who would be motivated to see a system fail..maybe several people who aren't constantly monitored.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I suspect the problem was man made. Lot's of low educated people looking at loosing their job.
There is no technical reason for a system like that not to work. I agree RFID would be a better way of dealing with that.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Germany has experienced a population explosion of rats and mice who found new homes in subterranean tunnels that lead to many homes and businesses.
I think "Eastern coast" is not the defining area. In the Boston area and in New England in general, basements aren't universal, but its pretty damn close (although around here we commonly call them "cellars". The phrase "down cellar" means in the basement for instance). As this comment's grandparent said, to a native New Englander a house without a basement is unusual. Some are simply storage areas for the heater, washer/dryer and stuff you've got stacked up. Some are full refurbished and might as well be considered another regular story.
And yes flooding can be a pain. When there's snow on the ground and it rains (or to a lesser extent when its melting) or if you live at the bottom of a hill you better have waterproofing and maybe a sump pump.
WTF is the point of this link? Are we going to bury tunnels under major cities to get delivery trucks off the roads, what a pointless expense! Do you have any idea what is under most modern cities? And most of the plumbing, wiring, etc are documented about as well as most major software projects - barely. Ken
Ken
My understanding is that I *do* own whatever is under my property. If there's oil/gas/other valuable stuff under the property that I own, then those resources are my property.
Or not. In many areas, the government sold off the mineral rights (the rights to the underground resources you're talking about) to a mining company decades ago.
A friend of mine (pardon the pun), worked for 30 years in a limestone mine. Most people in the mid-sized city above the mine didn't even know it was there, and didn't know that a huge amount of stuff had been (and continues to be) mined out from under their land.
As an aside, he was full of fun stories about how when they reopened part of the mine that had been closed off for thirty years they found a bunch of 1950s cars buried down there, and how when they needed to get water for the machines they drilled upwards - and the water came out hot.
Remember the Simpson's episode featuring the "Burns Slant-Drilling Company" that sucked out all of the oil from under the school? It's not so far from reality.
Conversely, if there's nasty stuff in the ground under my property (old chemical tanks, etc.), then I'm responsible to remove said stuff or pay the price for environmental damage that they might cause.
Ah, that's where they get you, because you're most likely correct about that.
Putting moderation advice in your
They made a lot of weird design decisions, such as sharp corners, that would have been corrected over time had they just had a system that allowed them to track luggage and identify the bottlenecks. When this first went in, it had very little staff. No one was looking at losing a job. This was a new facility and did not displace any previous system. This really did fail in its implementation without any sort of sabotage.
I don't think it was uneducated people. I think it was educated ones who were the problem here. They had a nice drawing and flow chart as well as theory to support the system. Where they failed was in the nuts and bolts. This thing really screams "paper design". Just getting people involved who had a background in luggage movement would have helped at the early stages. They used an optical scanning system on paper barcodes that easily folded. They used lightweight plastic bins that luggage did not fit well into giving a high center of gravity. They had sharp corners. They had weird transitions between conveyor belts. They had buggy conveyor belts to the aircraft. They had no real-time tracking of traffic flow and had no means of determining where an blockage occurred or of stopping the conveyor belts before a huge pile-up occurred.
It was *all* technical reasons for its failure.
And yes.. you're right. There is no technical reason for a system like that to not work. They designed a system with a lot of flaws. The theory was relatively sound.
i remember this very old tokusatsu (live action from japan) called CyberCops, where hi-tech cops in armor would request for additional weapons in a phone boot, and then the weapon would've be sent to a nearby trapdoor through a series of underground tunnels.
"life is a joke, and someone is laughing at me"
No doubt the concept can be extended to Pizzas and Chinese takeout as well...
For instance the first TV sets were hidden as a piece of furniture. Now they are in open.
If we make the diameter of the tube about 80 cm we can forward humans as well as cargo.
Ugly? Not as ugly as 1 million killed in traffic crashes every year. The 3rd world war. These pipes will be our protection against the current traffic world war.
If the computer system regulates the traffic in this system it could be safe. One could even travel long distance in this capsule. The pipe should be placed on the ocean floor for this. Like cables nowadays. Water as coolant will allow tremendous speeds.
Visit No-Dig 2008, April 27 through May 2, the trade show of the microtunneling industry. This is routine construction technology; if you need to put a pipe under a busy street, it's quite possible to do so. Small diameter pipes with short runs are installed by "pipe jacking", where the pipe is simply forced through dirt with hydraulic cylinders. For larger pipes and longer runs, there's "horizontal directional drilling", which is derived from oil well technology.
True robotic tunnel boring machines for small tunnels are being talked about, but they're not moving dirt yet.
Tunnel boring machines don't just drill a hole; they build the tunnel. TBMs have a cutter head in front, which is jacked forward as it cuts. The TBM's jacks push against the previous tunnel rings for support, or against the tunnel walls in hard-rock tunneling. This creates a gap between the front and back of the TBM. Once enough space has been opened up for another tunnel ring, the jacks are retracted and another tunnel ring is installed, in segments. Tunnel ring segments can be metal or concrete; the London Underground, especially the Jubilee Line, uses metal tunnel rings bolted together.
Behind the cutting head of the TBM is a big construction project compressed into a small space. There's machinery for erecting the ring segments, which can weigh tons. There's usually a two-track narrow gauge rail line behind the TBM, with muck cars taking away the dirt, segment cars delivering more ring segments, track cars carrying more construction rail track, and the occasional tool or worker car. So the back end of a TBM may have a hundred feet or more of materials handling equipment.
Here's a video of an animation of a TBM. This is a hard-rock TBM, used in the Alps. Somewhat different designs are used in soft rock (like the chalk of Eurotunnel) and in wet ground.
Cramming all this into a small robotic package is a tough job that hasn't been done yet. There's considerable automation in these things, but not yet enough to run them in places where people can't go.
Thanks, but I'll wait for a Matter Compiler.
i think it will be successful only if you can send porn through it.
Google has a few chapters of Richard's book about military tunnel-digging posted.
-FL
This idea scares me. The last time I opened the trapdoor to my cellar I was eaten by a grue.
Tube to curb would be disastrously expensive. Tube to local pickup station is a different story.
In the Wild West, towns would spring up around railroads. In this case, Internet companies would tend to congregate near the local pickup stations.
The primary early destinations for this type of system would be Fedex, UPS, Post office. Each of their offices in a city would connect to the others.
After that connections to airports and possibly docks. Repackage the multiple smaller tubes into a standard shipping container to become compatible with the big boys.
Couple of questions:
Does the shape have to be round?
If not can "This side up" be maintained?
Can maximum lateral G force limits be maintained?
The reason I ask this is for delicate goods shipping. I want my pizza to arrive hot and right side up!
The other reason is that combining box shaped packages works SO much better than combining cylinders.
I have a better idea! Let's just use trebuchets to deliver the packages!
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
'cause that's what it is, in more ways than one :)
Slashdot allowing picture uploads... oh dear! Lets not go there ;) I really don't have the desire to see any gaping holes.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/03/0133226 The ET3 site is still up.
"Good news, everyone!"
I've got a desktop trebuchet that gets used to deliver candy around the office. Werther's fly pretty good, but the lifesaver's packaging makes them less than ideal projectiles. Jolly Ranchers also fly quite well, and make a pretty good sounding whack when they hit a cubicle wall.
:)
I'm not sure a pizza box would do to well, and very likely wouldn't land right side up, but it would make a very tasty mess, and take a lot less than 45 minutes to have it delivered via trebuchet.