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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

If the new infrastructure cost is less than the old manual labor cost, you can bank on the infrastructure being built.

Truckers holding out on "only humans can handle last mile" are in for a surprise when we start rebuilding the last miles.

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Well, the tide has been turning in many cities towards building more human-scale infrastructure by improving walkability and protected lanes for bikees/scooters etc. Delivery bots have a severe risk of wrecking the "flow" of sidewalks and bike lanes by being slow or just behaving robotically instead of like a person.

(Side comment/why I'm interested: I finally have bandwidth for civid engagement and I decided I'd like to work on helping my already cycling-friendly city enact policies to encourage food delivery services to use bike delivery, as part of its upcoming bike network plan.)

I want one of those pneumatic tubes that banks have installed that runs from the local Chipotle to my house ... I'd even pay for it.

I think even random citizens would be happy to adjust to it.

Stanford has a pneumatic tube system for lab samples and it's several miles long and you can tour it!

https://sm.stanford.edu/archive/stanmed/2010summer/article4....

I would abuse the FUCK out of a burrito delivery pneumatic tube system to my house and would become orca fat.

There was a good "how its made" out there that showed a company that sells them for hospitals and etc.

It was cool to see how the various intersections and etc worked.

I cannot seem to find the right words to google, but you’d enjoy reading about (Chicago maybe?) a city that had a long rotating pipe running under the city. Instead of using electricity, or maybe prior to electricity, factories could attach a strap to the pipe to power machines.

JFYI:

http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/COMMS/pneumess/pneumess.h...

You mean like the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel? https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...

Don't underestimate the option of "if the cost of making the old infrastructure hostile to other users is even less"..

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