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Comment by danr4 | Hacker News Reader

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danr4

I don’t understand why we don’t have delivery tunnels

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Because digging tunnels is an absurd amount of work?

We still do it for cables, water and sewage?

All of which use max 10cm diameter pipes at the source. You need to 10x that (100x area) to delivery stuff.

That is a very interesting idea: to build small tunnels / raise along the side walk/streets for small robots/drones. It even does not need to be a tunnel: a covered trench, 50cmx50cm , would do the trick.

We have tunnels (in cities in the UK), they're called storm drains. Using such tunnels for deliveries when it's raining would be right out.

However when cycle lanes are put in, alongside them we could have delivery-bot lanes, maybe? Although if you have to install infrastructure then it might be as well to go full Futurama and have giant vacuum-delivery tubes.

What about using the road as the bot delivery lane, using an electric van as the bot? The MVP could be a diesel van with a human driver :-)

The main idea is to have no human along the line :).

No actually, that is not the main idea behind Zipline. The idea is to make delivery more efficient.

NYC does have delivery tunnels! Or tunnel, probably. There’s a tunnel in manhattan under 9th avenue that connects the Morgan postal sorting facility to the Farley post office!

Similar things have existed like the Chicago Tunnel Company or the London Post Office Railway.

Yeah, they were actually kind of practical, at least for some products and geographies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube#Historical_use

I remember seeing a big one of these built at the CCC Congress. It had some bugs but people were able to use it to send capsules all over the convention center. It was a cool steampunk alternate future kind of experience.

You mean like a city-wide pneumatic tube setup?

Seems kinda Jetsons to me.

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