A world without trucks
If water,
sewage, gas and oil can be transported through underground pipelines, why not consumer
goods as well?
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"You could order something on the internet and pick it up in your cellar the next morning"
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Sending
cargo goods through underground pipelines is anything but new. As early as the
second half of the 19th century, systems for the transport of mail
and small packages became quite common in most world cities. In these pneumatic
post networks (they are still in use in some shops and large buildings today), little
capsules are propelled by means of air pressure through tubes, reaching a speed
of around 35 km/h (25 mph).
Note
that pneumatic systems could deliver physical objects, which is hard to do with
email or any other automatic technology in use today.
Revival
Since the 60s
several attempts were made to transport goods by pneumatic networks with a much larger diameter (picture left: capsule system in Ontario). Lines were built in the US, the UK, Canada, Russia, Japan and Germany. However, they never became much of a success. Also today, several inventors and companies try to revive the technique.
It’s not hard to
find out why: due to traffic congestion, a courier in a truck today needs
considerably more time to deliver a package than the pneumatic post systems of
the 19th century.
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"A courier in a truck today needs considerably more time to deliver a package than the pneumatic post systems of the 19th century"
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The most viable techniques, however, adopt just the concept of automated
underground transport: they make use of well-known electric propulsion instead of
compressed air or electromagnetic forces, and they envision extreme low
speeds of 7 to 35 kilometres per hour (4 to 22 mph). In fact, they mix the concept of pneumatic transport with that of an automated subway line or a conveyor belt.
The German
system resembles research that was conducted in
The ambitious plan consisted of a finely-woven network with one hub for every 1,000 to 5,000 homes, which boiled down to a maximum walking distance of 750 meters to pick up goods (the information is not on the internet, data and illustration taken from paper brochure).
These concepts offer exciting possibilities. Goods can be transported from factories to stores, from factories to factories or even from stores to consumers - in the long run, the infrastructure could become so intricate that goods can be delivered to individual homes. You could order something on the internet and pick it up through a trapdoor in your cellar the next morning.
In the Dutch plan, the city hubs
would also offer the possibility to send goods to other cities, which
would effectively turn them into a democratized courier service. It
might also become possible to send goods from one home to another: email for
things.
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"Thanks to the automated control, the low speed and the higher efficiency of the electric drive, the energy consumption of the system is much lower than that of any other form of transport"
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Even more important than the higher
delivery speed, is the fact that a separate, automated infrastructure makes it possible
to predict very accurately when goods will arrive. That makes it possible for
companies to lower the amount of warehouses.
Last but not least, automated transport is cheaper – not only because
of the more reliable delivery of the goods, but also because there are no
drivers to pay and because energy use is much lower.
But extending the road network has one, important benefit: it concerns the extension of an already existing infrastructure, which means that it immediately yields results. Developing a new (inter)national underground transport system, on the other hand, asks an enormous initial investment and the results are only visible after some decennia. It’s long term thinking versus short term thinking, and humans (especially politicians) invariably prefer the latter.
©h Kris De Decker (edited by Vincent Grosjean) (es)
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UPDATE : This article was featured on Slashdot, together with a story from Modern Mechanix on Chicago's underground freight tunnel network (which was not an automated system, but nevertheless impressive). Be sure to check out the comments on both sites, since there is more information to find.
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