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."
Man in the middle (Score:5, Funny)
Ok, I'll be the man in the middle
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Man in the middle (Score:4, Informative)
Any good Man in the Middle is able to send the data to its original destination with at least trying to make it appear like it hasn't been tampered with, probably by some self signed Cert.
So, I mean, things like Chocolate bars, or Apple juice, you could probably get away with.
Re:Man in the middle (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Man in the middle (Score:5, Funny)
Well, if you stole one slice of ham off of every ham sandwich being sent, you would have a lot of ham.
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You're thinking of salami [wikipedia.org], surely?
Re:Man in the middle (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Man in the middle (Score:5, Funny)
Peter Gibbons: [Explaining the plan] Alright so when the sub routine combines the sandwich it uses all these extra chunks of ham that just get sliced off. So we simplified the whole thing, we round them all down and drop the remainder into a fridge we bought.
Joanna: [Confused] So you're stealing?
Peter Gibbons: Ah no, you don't understand. It's very complicated. It's uh it's aggregate, so I'm talking about fractions of a crumb here. And over time they add up to a lot.
Joanna: Oh okay. So you're gonna be making a lot of sandwiches, right?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah.
Joanna: Right. It's not yours?
Peter Gibbons: Well it becomes ours.
Joanna: How is that not stealing?
Peter Gibbons: [pauses] I don't think I'm explaining this very well.
Re:Man in the middle (Score:5, Funny)
Citizens of Washington: barrels are no more!
Enter the age of pork-tube politics!
- RG>
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> So, I mean, things like chocolate bars and apple juice, you could probably get away with.
Judging by the examples you picked, I can guess what you have in mind, and I assure you, people will notice.
Re:Man in the middle (Score:5, Funny)
Who would be suspicious of the box of Fudgepackers Browneye Chocolate Bar®, and a crate sent from Golden Showers Apple Orchard 100% Natural Organic Apple Juice®?
Where is your marketing sense of adventure?
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I'm in your internets, eating your cheezburgers.
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http://www.idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda-weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm [idlewords.com]
"Electronic displays in each taqueria light up in real time with orders placed on the East Coast, and within minutes a fresh burrito has been assembled, rolled in foil, marked and dropped down one of the small vertical tubes that rise like organ pipes in restaurant kitchens throughout the city."
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: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:Man in the middle (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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http://www.law.berkeley.edu/faculty/sugarmans/Wendy%20TortStoryFinal%20ii.doc [berkeley.edu]
I recommend starting on page 12. The stuff leading up to that is lengthy discussion that doesn't really talk about the relevant case, Bodine v. Enterprise High School
Re:Man in the middle (Score:4, Funny)
His name is Doctor Zoidberg to you!
We are going to need new acronyms (Score:5, Funny)
DDOS = distributed denial of snacks
We are going to need new laws (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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Besides, the software would be prohibitively expensive. See the Denver International Airport's automated bag handling system [wikipedia.org], which has long-since been abandoned.
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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.
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.
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Cargo shipped by train is already quite efficient, and the infrastructure is already in place. It's surprising how often people try to re-invent trains.
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The problem with trains is that they're good for shipping huge quantities of goods to points along a line, and are much more efficient the farther between stops they go. Because of this, they're good for shipping between far-apart cities.
However, they're not as efficient as boats, so it's actually more efficient to ship goods by boat from California to New York (through the Panama Canal) than across the continent by train.
The other problem trains have is getting the goods from the terminal to where they're
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2. Induction... psshhhhh. that's no problem, we're going to keep a vacuum cleaner nearby to pull them out all pneumatic tube 1800s style.
3. see 2
4. as many as you can fit end to end. If you need to squeeze in more you can try compression, but tar might make the food taste funny
5. This is simple to solve by using "quantum" type security. Don't try to prevent theft, just make sure you know when it happens
Re:Logistic issues I see: (Score:5, Informative)
1: Getting right of way to drill the holes needed for that stuff.
Similar to problems laying fiber right now. Next time a road is dug up to repair something, stick in a foodtube as well. Eventually a network will start to take shape - it may take a couple of decades, but at minimal disruption and cost.
2: Maintaining it. It sounds like if the induction motors break down, fixing those would be a PITA.
Have service cannisters using onboard power that can push the broken cannister to the next service chute.
3: Unsticking the cargo if it gets jammed somewhere.
See above.
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.
Depends on the length of each link, and how far apart the service depots are.
5: Security of cargo. I'm sure there will be people who would love to divert things to their end.
That's something that already happens in real life with trucks, and especially the internet. It's an inherent problem whichever way you choose to distribute things.
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?
I'd have thought the tubes would be sealed, the only entrance/exits being at the service depots. If a bum breaks into a power station and gets electrocuted, does the power company get sued?
7: Plans for power outages.
IP networks are subject to those too. Some small UPS at each depot to ensure that cannisters get to a depot in the event of a power outage, rather than get stuck in tunnels.
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1. We can do it for sewer/subways, so we can do it for this. ...and trucks, roads etc don't neet maintence? ...unsticking trucks when they get stuck on bridges / ontop of passanger cars. ...have you ever been on the M25 (or insert-name-of-big-highway) on a Friday afternoon? ...you think it'll be worse than shoplifting / 'falling off the back of a lorry'? ...and this is worse than road deaths / train deaths right now?
2.
3.
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5.
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7. Fuel strikes?
Sure, you've raised some valid points, but you've completely omitt
Re:Logistic issues I see: (Score:5, Funny)
8. Spam. Cans and cans of the stuff. Flowing into your house.
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.
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.
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In the US, this might be useful, but if the tubes get saturated, I'm sure short haul trucking may not be dented. Especially of the cost of getting tube access from a warehouse to a store is high.
USPS, et. al. won't be affected, unless we can get Heinlein-style intercontinental ballistic tubes going. They likely wouldn't be affected much due to their business being regional, or national for the most part.
That's a really great idea but... (Score:3, Insightful)
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:That's a really great idea but... (Score:4, Informative)
Tunneling really isn't that hard in most places. All you need is a deep hole on each side to assemble tunnel boring machines. You might run into problems with pipelines, wires and other tunnels, but you can always go deeper.
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AFAIK they pretty much laser-guide them now. However as the tunnel gets larger and/or longer the complexity increases, so your under-the-road tunnel is pretty trivial compared to what is being discussed here.
A non-logistical problem (Score:2)
I like the idea, but I think that the biggest problems they might encounter on a larger scale is the need to obtain easements as the pipes will inevitably run onto private property at some point.
Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
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When amortized over an entire train the cost of a driver is negligible.
Re:Or... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Chinese Take out (Score:3)
This was in an issue from about 20 years ago. Kudos to anyone who can find a copy of this spread.
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You're actually thinking of something that appeared in "The Way Things REALLY Work [amazon.com]".
Polyethylene Pam (Score:4, Funny)
I think we already had an energy-saving networked system like this that produced way less carbon than Diesel trucks, they were called TRAINS.
Re:Polyethylene Pam (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, all it will take is a packet collision between my order from an air conditioning company and some other guy's stool sample on its way to the lab and the shit will really hit the fan.
Oh the huge mess! (Score:2)
I'm not saying this new system will be bad, but ask anyone who worked maintenance at the Johnson Space Center building 30 what happened when people sent Cokes through the P-Tube system. You piss off a bunch of techs! (seriously though, I love the idea of a freight tunnel system, it's something I've been designing in my head for a long time - on multiple scales)
Hmm.. This idea sounds familiar (Score:2)
I know I've proposed something similiar, though I certainly didn't get as specific. 2 meters sounds a bit long for 'tubes', but I suppose if the tunnels are a meter in diameter they'd be about proportional to the old pneumatic systems.
Of course, I also proposed to dual-purpose PRT systems for this - the idea being that package delivery companies could design vehicles to make deliveries, saving the expense of a driver, oversized vehicles, even the need for as many transfer stations. Instead you have smalle
Who's going to pay for it? (Score:2)
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Digging tunnels large enough for cars and trucks and safe enough to carry people is expensive.
Chicago had a small train system (Score:3)
built underground and intended to be used similarly to this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company [wikipedia.org]
and London had a narrow gauge railway for a moving mail between sorting stations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway [wikipedia.org]
William
Why stop at shipping? (Score:3)
Pneumatic tubes? (Score:2)
Why are the calling them food tubes? We already have Pneumatic tubes [wikipedia.org]. This just a scaled up version. I had a similar idea once for big cities. It might make a lot of sense, especially if it's general purpose, like for the post office.
But "food tubes"... really?!!? That just sounds gross. You brits are weird. How about the "megmatic tube system" that happens to also ship food?
Internet memes becomming reality (Score:3)
So we can push button, receive bacon?
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.
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Then stick people in them (Score:3)
Step 1) Why only 60mph? Once you have evacuated the air in the tubes I don't see why there would be a speed limit, how about 600mph? Or 6000 mph?
Step 2) Now use it for general cargo.
Step 3) Now put humans in it. I can't help but think they are already thinking of this because a 2m (6 ft 6 inches) capsule is enough to fit most people. Unfortunately, squishy humans are limited to a around 1G of acceleration, but I love the idea of a 15 minute trip from New York to Washington DC.
Re:Then stick people in them (Score:5, Funny)
step 3) might I kindly request we put the air back in first?
Meh. (Score:3)
Why build all that infrastructure? Surely there have been enough developments in accuracy to deliver things ballistically? Caveat: It might suit some goods more than others.
Re:Bush was right after all (Score:5, Informative)
That was Ted Stevens, not George W. Bush.
Re:Bush was right after all (Score:5, Informative)
... so it's like a series of tubes, right?
Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) said that, not Bush.
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:Bush was right after all (Score:4, Funny)
Unfortunately this will be more like UDP, and the destroyed canisters won't get resent.
Re:Bush was right after all (Score:5, Insightful)
True, but destroyed trucks do not get re-sent either.
Re:Bush was right after all (Score:4, Informative)
You obviously don't drive the 401 :)
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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.
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Surely the risk of DDOS attack has always existing in the real world. We have all heard the one about the guy who books every pizza delivery, every courier pick-up, every builder, every plumber, every skip for hire, ever mail order catalogue etc. to be delivered Friday morning to their enemies house. Thanks to disposable cell phones there is little risk of being caught.
The real problems are mechanical. The tubes would need to be pretty wide and have some way of being accessed and repaired. The system would
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.
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I think he was just considering the relative weaknesses of two systems, and using terrorists as a foil, not trying to spread FUD about terrorism.
That said, s/tubes/roads/g and I don't see any difference.
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: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.
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It doesn't really add one. Less surface shipping by truck/plane/rail would reduce the risks there, so it's a +1 + -1 = 0 situation at worst. Since the tubes don't have to run close to highways, power grid, or places with lots of people/civilian targets, it could be designed to minimize human risks, for a net negative terror threat potential.
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.
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With the exception of New Orleans, I've never been in a place that had such a limited number of access points. In this city, it is 3 of them...I-10E, I-10W and the Causeway bridge (N) across Lake Pontchartrain...all are bridges.
But other than this, I've not known or seen many sta
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.
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Dropping packages is a significantly worse failure mode than dropping packets.
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the sms message sent to 911 asking for help: I'd assume to be one that would REALLY suck if it were to get dropped. even though the MS MAY be able to resend it at a later time, it could still make the difference between life and death.
Re:Sounds likes Denver airports luggage system (Score:4, Interesting)
Ugh this has been discussed to death, it's called Personal Rapid Transit. The only potentially cost-effective way to build it is as a monorail. Replacing roads with it is expensive, but it's actually cheaper for a given capacity than a road on basically any terrain but salt flats (where you just dump some gravel along the borders and call it a road.)
It would be great to do the whole thing as a vac/pneumatic system, but then you have to massively increase the price of the track. The most credible solutions suggested so far involve an electric car which is powerful enough to push another car so that if one should break down, the next one can shove it along to a siding.
Chicago had a freight tube system for decades (Score:5, Informative)
Not kidding.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company [wikipedia.org]
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
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This also just seems like a bigger version of the pneumatic tubes you see in old movies.
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Same thing as what happens today when a truck hits a large bump and smashes a few cases of corn syrup, or someone at a factory or distribution center drops a couple of cases, or they slide off a conveyor, etc etc. Shipping damage happens no matter what the transport method.
The containers would no doubt be sealed, so any sticky gooeyness would be discovered after the tube is removed from the system.
Collisions are less likely than with a truck, because the cargo tubes are not independently powered and indepe
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Collisions are less likely than with a truck, because the cargo tubes are not independently powered and independently operated, there's a central computer managing traffic routing.
They're also virtually impossible inside the tubes due to the physics of the situation. Pistons blown through cylinders by air have an inherent buffer of air between them. If something stops one, the air between it and any following it compresses and decelerates the follower. Worst case is a slightly leaky stuck cylinder lettin
Re:You don't seem to understand... (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, the real story of Denver's baggage handling system was that poor design and insufficient technology can kill a good idea. Here's a good retrospective analysis [google.com] of the situation. The actual design of the system was done as an afterthought, in restricted geometry, unrealistic timeframe, and unrealistic budget, without any kind of meaningful backup system. Just learning how to manage the queues right is something that should have had a pilot study before design was even begun. Also, due to the then-high cost of RFID tags, individual bags were tagged with bar codes, and only the carts were RFID tagged. While RFID-reading of the bags would have been easy, bar-code reading of them was a disaster. And lastly, they simply scaled up way too fast from existing systems. All of the Denver components previously existed and were used elsewhere, but Denver greatly increased the speed and throughput, directly interlinked everything, and without a backup, every snag held everything else up. And without a study on how to deal with these contingencies, the whole system was a disaster.
There are many lessons to be learned from Denver, but "central control = bad" is not one of them. The main lessons are "don't rush or underfund leaps in technology" and "walk before you run."
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From what I've read, the Denver Airport luggage system could have worked fabulously well. The problem was the morons working there constantly did things to screw it up, either through incompetence, or sabotage (because it requires far fewer people to operate than a regular airport's mostly-manual system). Because of all the morons, the system was deactivated and abandoned. Technically, it was a great system.
It's basically the same reason unionized American auto plants have been a disaster, and auto compa
Re:Sounds likes Denver airports luggage system (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, you have a good idea.
We have a nationwide electricity grid, sending much-needed electrons everywhere.
Why don't we do the same for water? It can be even not-so-clean water & the treatment can be left to the last mile to deal with. Floods in one area? Drought in another? Let them work together to solve the problem. A nationwide water grid would be interesting. Surely it's already implemented to lesser extents somewhere in the world.