Foodtubes Proposes Underground, Physical Internet 431
geek4 writes "Automatically routed canisters could replace trucks with an Internet of things, says Foodtubes. A group of academics is proposing a system of underground tunnels which could deliver food and other goods in all weathers with massive energy savings. The Foodtubes group wants to put goods in metal capsules two meters long, which are shifted through underground polyethylene tubes at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour, directed by linear induction motors and routed by intelligent software to their destinations. The group, which includes an Oxford physics professor and logistics experts, wants £15 million to build a five-mile test circuit, and believes the scheme could fund itself if used by large supermarkets and local councils, and could expand because it uses an open architecture."
Logistic issues I see: (Score:5, Insightful)
1: Getting right of way to drill the holes needed for that stuff.
2: Maintaining it. It sounds like if the induction motors break down, fixing those would be a PITA.
3: Unsticking the cargo if it gets jammed somewhere.
4: How many of these can travel through the tube network at a time? If the induction motors can't handle that many, it might not be as efficient as the company touts.
5: Security of cargo. I'm sure there will be people who would love to divert things to their end.
6: Transients climbing in the tubes, and cleaning the messes up if they get struck. If a bum dies in the tunnel, does the company get sued for wrongful death?
7: Plans for power outages.
There are a number of basic logistical concerns. It would be nice to have a freight tunnel system, but it is fraught with a number of issues.
Expect resistance (Score:4, Insightful)
Short haul truckers will resist this, but I doubt they have a good lobby...yet.
USPS, UPS and FedEx will like this IF they are involved. Otherwise they will fight it tooth and nail.
That's a really great idea but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Expect resistance (Score:5, Insightful)
Short haul truckers will resist this, but I doubt they have a good lobby...yet.
USPS, UPS and FedEx will like this IF they are involved. Otherwise they will fight it tooth and nail.
Very good point. If you can throw in a bone to get them behind it, then you have billions of dollars in capital backing you up. Otherwise, those billions will fight you to the bitter end.
Re:Bush was right after all (Score:5, Insightful)
But if it's internet-like, the cannisters will re-route and still get to the destination.
Re:Sounds likes Denver airports luggage system (Score:4, Insightful)
Same as if a router goes down. Cannisters/data is rerouted, send in an engineer to fix the problem.
Re:That's a really great idea but... (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. Let's never do anything that's a good idea if it somehow impacts existing infrastructure.
Re:Logistic issues I see: (Score:3, Insightful)
In fact, forget the underground tube. Just lay them on the street. And make them larger so they can carry 2 to 4 person. These are the self driving car we been waiting for. Safer then flying cars. No more trafic jam. No more road deicing and thier awful effect on the environement. Tubes are the road of the future.
Re:Logistic issues I see: (Score:4, Insightful)
There are other reliability issues too:
1. Every network system I'm aware of relies on being able to duplicate packets at virtually no cost. Obviously, a physical packet can't be duplicated like that.
2. Dropped packets in an electronic system aren't a problem. In a physical system, it leaves a pile of crap.
Not the first with this idea (Score:4, Insightful)
In the '90s, a feasibility study was done in the Netherlands for an Underground Logistics System. It involved little carts that could drive themselves, and carry a variety of cargo pallets. The idea was to connect Amsterdam's Schiphol airport to a nearby train station and a flower market. They never built it because the financial risks were too big.
More recently, a Belgian engineering firm proposed an Underground Container Mover for the port of Antwerp, which is basically a large underground conveyor belt for containers. It would run in a circle connecting container terminals with other terminals and highways on the other side of the river. This could remove a lot of trucks from the busy highways, especially the tunnels.
The basic idea is that as ground is becoming more and more rare, we shouldn't waste it on cargo transport. Moving most of it underground makes a lot of sense. And we've actually managed to move a lot of it (up to 90% in some areas) underground already, in terms of tonne-miles of goods transported. Just think of drinkable water, gas and sewage, but also oil and a lot of chemicals in industrial zones. Pipelines are transporting more than most people can imagine, and they're great. Trying to move boxed goods in a similar fashion is the logical next step, there are just a few problems we haven't figured out yet.
Re:Logistic issues I see: (Score:5, Insightful)
There are similar issues with relying on Semis to ship goods
1: Getting right of way to expand or build new roads
2: Wear and tear on publicly owned roads
3: Traffic accidents killing innocent bystanders
4: Massive inefficiencies at every level, even in the best conditions
5: Security of cargo is still an issue
6: Plans for storms, road outages, construction
7: Cost of an estimated 10 million semi drivers in the US alone
Basically, there are logistical issues that are similarly difficult to overcome with one of the systems that is currently commonly used.
Re:Man in the middle (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, at 2 meters long, I'm sure plenty of people will try that one.
Hope they can hold their breath.
Re:Bush was right after all (Score:5, Insightful)
True, but destroyed trucks do not get re-sent either.
OHH MAHH GODD! TURRRISSTS! (Score:5, Insightful)
The terrorists have won in my opinion, if the first thing you can think of is only how it could be a potential weakness.
We have hundreds of nerve centers that are already weak.
Re:Bush was right after all (Score:4, Insightful)
So? If you want to hurt trade by truck, you don't blow up the individual trucks any more than you blow up individual canisters moving through the foodtubes. Instead, you blow up critical bridges and tunnels.
Or, critical facilities involved with the production, delivery, and refinement of fuel for the trucks.
Or you just work to destabilize regimes in countries where the fuel for the trucks is produced.
Re:Or... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Bush was right after all (Score:4, Insightful)
Road and rail systems are also fixed, undefended infrastructure, yet they aren't terrorist magnets, nor does damaging them "kill trade". Terrorists do occasionally hit the rail system, though they prefer passenger rail (subways being the really obvious example).
I think you need to re-examine the word "terrorist". A terrorist does not seek to blow stuff up for shits and giggles, he seeks to kill or terrorize people, usually people the terrorist has some beef with (politically, religiously, racially, whatever). The damage to infrastructure is incidental. If you give a terrorist a bomb and free reign to choose a target, they'll choose somewhere crowded with whatever group they want to hurt.
Deliberate infrastructure damage is more a military way of thinking, i.e. crippling supply lines. A spy or saboteur working for an enemy power in wartime would target fixed infrastructure in the hopes of damaging the war effort. And, in fact, that does happen; railways were one such target once upon a time. The solution in the past was redundancy and not over-relying on single points of failure. An internet-like transport system would actually be a step forward for redundancy.
Re:Man in the middle (Score:4, Insightful)
That's going to be the biggest problem if this system goes live. Not the terrorist crap, but morons looking for a free roller coaster ride. They'll probably have to put some sort of bio sensor inside the capsules that will stop it from moving if there's something alive inside.
Re:Logistic issues I see: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Chicago had a freight tube system for decades (Score:4, Insightful)
Why it will never be built in any American city:
but after a terrorism scare in the early 2000s, all access to the tunnels has been secured
Re:Bush was right after all (Score:4, Insightful)
Two meter long capsules entering your house through appropriately sized tubes at up to 60 miles an hour represent a serious "last mile problem", (with the obvious solution of a smaller tube system connecting to a Tube Service Provider). So, we're back to an analog of the current model, where not everyone has a direct connection to the physical net. Just be glad you won't get 'ping' flooded with empty 2 meter capsules, or a 200,000 capsule DDOS attack.
Re:Bush was right after all (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it would be very easy to blow up enough of it to make a big difference. As it stands right now, there is one main supply line, for example, into the State of Maine - Interstate 95. There are two bridges that cross into the state near that interstate, and one of them is falling apart on its own and needs little help to complete the journey. The other bridge, if closed, would force all traffic entering or leaving the state to the South to drive 20 miles out of their way, a good chunk of it on back roads that aren't designed to handle the 6 lanes each way of traffic that the current two bridges provide the capacity for (and quite often use to the point of backups).
During the summer, the I95 corridor regularly has toll backups of well over ten miles. One car bomb set off at one of those toll booths would inconvenience two lines of cars ten miles long and four cars wide, and any trucks that happen to be mixed in.
And that's for a rural state with under 2 million residents. It gets worse when you go urban. A lot worse. Three car bombs could take out the Calahan Tunnel, the I-90 Mass Pike Bridge, and the bridge at the William F., McLellan Highway. A couple more could take out the offramps off I95 in that area, and isolate Boston into two unconnected cities for quite some time.
Look at New York. Take out the Holland and Brooklyn Battery tunnels and a half-dozen bridges and New York City will come to a standstill that made the WTC bombings look like "business as usual".
The highway system is deeply vulnerable to attack, as is the electrical system, the sewer and water systems in many major cities, and lots of infrastructure. The important distinction is that these would be excellent military targets but poor terrorism targets. Terrorists want a large immediate and direct body count.
If anything, a tube network like this will have distinct advantages from a national security standpoint. It will allow food supplies to continue to flow in the event of an attack on the highway system, or if this system is attacked we can still use the highway system for critical supplies (we just need to commandeer the trucks currently used for less-critical supplies). It provides redundancy.
Infrastructure for this will be cheaper and easier to build than a highway, so you can build a lot more redundancy into a system like this at lower cost.
A system like this would be less accessible and therefore harder to target. Any asshole can rent a Ryder truck, load it with some Diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate fertilizer, and "McVeigh" a significant bridge or section of highway for a very long time. Attacking a sealed tube (particularly underground) where cars don't normally go is harder. And the tube, being smaller, can be repaired more quickly and we can use the highways as a backup or reroute until it is fixed. Probably faster than you could design some way of getting the goods from the tubes to a truck.
Re:Man in the middle (Score:4, Insightful)
The trouble is that our society has decided that protecting idiots from themselves is not only the right thing to do, but legally mandated. The whole reason all those moronic warning labels are on everything (Do not drive vehicle with sunshade in place. Do not eat silicon moisture absorber in the stereo box. Do not spray water into electrical outlet.) is because somewhere, someone actually did whatever it's warning you against, and sued, and won.
In our society a burglar who falls through a skylight can sue the homeowner and has a good chance of winning. The same will happen here. Even though everyone knows the little moron shouldn't have been there, and that our gene pool will be far better off without him polluting it with his inevitably mentally deficient offspring, his estate will still collect a lot of money over it.