Underground Freight Networks 284
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."
Pneumatic Telegraph (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Pneumatic Telegraph (Score:4, Interesting)
A scene from Brazil [imdb.com] springs to mind...
hmmmm (Score:1, Interesting)
As a side note, roots that are growing in your sewer are not the best smelling things in the world.
Re:Fabbing (Score:3, Interesting)
Like DIA, DOA (Score:5, Interesting)
Denver International Airport tried something along that line [wikipedia.org].
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.
Chicago's system flooded (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:good luck w/ bombs (Score:5, Interesting)
The point is to be sensible about securing it, not to not have it. We still fly planes, don't we? We still allow rental of U-Haul trucks, right? Just because it CAN be used for bad behavior doesn't mean a) it will be, or b) it can't be secured with a reasonable amount of caution. Hell, if we felt THAT way about things, guns would have been outlawed a long time ago. (AND they would still exist anyway, AND people would still use them for bad stuff.)
All that said, though, of course subterranean tunnels make a tasty target for destructive behavior. The point is that a tunnel system under a metropolitan area should be carefully monitored. And if it can be quickly flooded (or all oxygen can be quickly removed) in the event of fire or "evildoers," all the better.
In effect, the tunnels under Chicago DID cause widespread damage a few years ago. A construction crew drove a piling down into the Chicago river and punched through the tunnel wall underneath, flooding the entire downtown area's basements with river water. So it can be dangerous to have the tunnels, but better provisions for evildoers and morons (probably more the latter) would have minimized the problem. That's an old tunnel system, but a new one could be built with the ability to quickly isolate one problem section.
I guess I'm reacting to the terror terror, you know? We must be wise and sensible, but if a tunnel system under the city is the only appropriate and complete solution to a given problem, we can't let fear of something rare (in fact, so rare as to be historically significant when it happens) take it off the table.
Fabbing and Patents (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Why did this fail in the past? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Fabbing (Score:5, Interesting)
Roosevelt Island Garbage Tunnels (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Pneumatic Telegraph (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I don't have a cellar (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, there is. In warmer climates basements are often cool and damp (which can make it feel even cooler) compared to the upstairs (this is true in Wisconsin where summers, while generally mild, can still hit 100 F on the hottest days. You spend more time in the basement on these days, usually next to your home-made dry bar. =P Of course tornadoes are irrelevant as generally if tornado sirens go off, everyone is running upstairs to stand on their porch to watch the tornado. hehe).
Given the extra living space, it's not uncommon to have a bedroom in the basement allowing for cooler and much more comfortable living conditions without having to resort to air conditioning. However, the other points such as water table, geography, natural disasters, hold true. Basements just aren't feasible in some areas.
Re:I don't have a cellar (Score:2, Interesting)
A basement complicates a lot the construction, and adds a lot more to the price: it's almost the same as building a two-stories house, with the added expense of having to dig a big hole, and later the expense of keeping that hole drained. Basements made sense in crowded cities/towns where the land price would be greater than the overhead imposed by an habitable basement.
1.6 meters of height ? Who is going to do maintenance in those tunnels? Hobbits ?
I wonder how are they planning to dig those tunnels in cities that already exist. It would be horribly expensive, those that would make this attempt will have to pay for a lot of structural damage to the buildings above due to vibrations, and a lot of buildings would have to be excluded because it would be mightily unsafe to alter the foundations to allow for "stations".
[I am an euro-skeptic] I call this "draining EU funds for sci-fi projects". The same bloody attitude resulted in the GM industry in Europe to fall behind: they wasted money on plastic-producing-rapeseed and other such projects in the early 1990s, and now are upset Monsanto et. comp stole the ground from below their feet with more practical research.[/I am an euro-skeptic]Re:I don't have a cellar (Score:3, Interesting)
I dream of a city of the future. Big forward thinking tech companies find some land at some highway crossing somewhere, invest in offices and infrastructure:
What you end up with is:
A beautiful, livable AND dense city for technology-oriented companies to open offices in. Optimal outdoor space use generates congregating areas that people actually want to go to. Easy to use and clean (in terms of power) public transportation with private transportation for those who want it; sustainable agrarian supply of perishables - imagine buying groceries from the corner store and having them be delivered from forty feet away instead of a thousand miles..
It would probably never happen, but who knows :) I wouldn't live there until a suitable artistic / musician culture blossomed...
Only to a point (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:I don't have a cellar (Score:1, Interesting)
Richard Sauder (Score:3, Interesting)
Google has a few chapters of Richard's book [google.ca] about military tunnel-digging posted.
-FL
Re:Why did this fail in the past? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a very good thing to do. As they say, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
However, I think these prior attempts at similar systems were mentioned in the article.
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.
Yep. The main problem with compressed-air systems is that they use a LOT of energy. It's ok if you just have a tube going 20-30 feet in a drive-thru window, but to send containers through pressurized tubes over distances of miles uses tons of energy using compressed air. Also, if the tubes aren't airtight, then they don't work well for obvious reasons.
These newer systems are talking about using electric propulsion which should eliminate these problems with pneumatic systems.
Who's going to pay for all this?
It depends on the particular project and how it's financed and run. But as an example, we the people pay for roads through our governments, because it benefits our society more than everyone hanging onto all their money and trying to find their own method of transportation which doesn't require roads.
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).
This one's pretty simple. If your area is highly prone to this sort of problem, then you shouldn't attempt any large, expensive infrastructure projects like this. Leave them to countries where people have better ethics, and where the political systems aren't so utterly corrupt. This is the same reason why New Orleans can't be secured in any way against flooding or hurricanes; the technology exists, and is in use in places like the Netherlands and London, but it's simply not possible to pull of such a project successfully in Louisiana because the politicians are all so corrupt. You'd end up spending billions of dollars, unveiling the covers, and finding that the project was never even started because the money had all been stolen. Obviously, this isn't a problem in places like the Netherlands, where they are quite successful in building enormous flood-control structures. The US (especially the eastern side) should probably stick with older technologies and much smaller projects, and be content with not having more modern and cheaper solutions, since they're not capable of electing non-corrupt politicians.