Foodtube - transporting food like oil, water, and gas.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/12/want-fries-with-those-packets-introducing-foodtubes.ars

by twidlit • 16 years ago

44 38 16 years ago

iwr• 16 years ago

In other words, a Soylent (Green) transportation network.

speleding2• 16 years ago

Sounds great, but why limit ourselves to food? If we are going through the trouble of building a pipeline all around the country we might as well use it for any type of cargo that will fit a 2m by 1m container.

jacques_chester• 16 years ago

My first instinct is "what about furniture"? And later, "hey, let's use the dimensions of shipping containers!"

The problem is volume of dirt to be removed. Assuming circular tunnels, the volume approximates (pi(r^2))length. It's an O(n2) problem to increase the size of cargo.

Hence the focus on food, I suppose. For small cargos in densely settled areas this might be viable. For long haul I think that rail and road will still be king and queen.

chopsueyar3• 16 years ago

Different type of piracy?

RiderOfGiraffes• 16 years ago

This has the potential to do for inland transportation what containers did for long-distance haulage. The problem is the infrastructure. There's a lot to do before the system works at all.

To bootstrap, some "community" needs to decide they want it, and then they need to build a small but extensible version. Extensions need to be able to "interface" with the existing system without necessarily being limited by it.

I can see this working as, say, the main means of transporting physical materials around a new Olympics venue, or a new commercial district.

It's basically an automated high-speed rail system, but underground.

jerf• 16 years ago

'Extensions need to be able to "interface" with the existing system without necessarily being limited by it.'

This is the blocker. The way I see this happening is a robotic inner-city courier that can live with humans on a sidewalk. The feasibility of this is no longer pie-in-the-sky, now it's merely "on the horizon". Once you have this, it becomes actually economical in another couple of years. Once it becomes economical, there are too many of them on the sidewalk and you start considering things like giving them their own lanes, or their own paths through buildings, or, eventually, their own access to underground tunnels. From there somebody works out that they can make money building a tunnel from Manhattan to the rest of the city, and the network starts forming.

The advantage of this approach is that once you have such robots you can start using current systems. Put a dedicated car on an otherwise normal freight train for these things, for instance. Eventually you've built a hybrid system that can accommodate all sorts of approaches.

It ends up looking like the Internet and will probably recapitulate its development. There's no point stringing a tube across the country from one endpoint to another unless you've got a network already working on both ends. Attempts to bootstrap will generally fail because they will be too focused on top-down deployments of massive tubes that won't be useful for years; the winners will be the people who successfully bootstrap from the bottom and build the network from the bottom up. The tech isn't quite there yet, though, but getting close.

So, I'd actually say it isn't even that "extensions" need to interface with the system, it is the system that will eventually be interfacing with the "extensions". The flexible robots have to come first, then we will build the tube network. Until those robots exist the tube network economics just make no sense, not even in a dense city.

grantbachman• 16 years ago

Screw it, just create a whole new general transportation system. Outfit some capsules with oxygen systems and transport people (who are shorter that 6 1/2 feet). It'd be a hell of a ride.

protomyth6• 16 years ago

I've actually been waiting for some group to setup a city somewhere with a new basic infrastructure than the road-liquid fuel model. It almost seems like someone could setup a community based on underground / enclosed personal and robot electrical wheeled transport for local movement with rail to get the distance movement. Not cheap, but if it starts small and has very good internet, it might attract some people to give a modest size project a go.

alexfarran• 16 years ago

Here you go: Masdar City http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9004209...

_debug_• 16 years ago

Idea : We have undersea fiber optic cables. Why not have undersea foodtubes to deliver food to poorer nations? Developed countries waste bucketloads of food every day.

I'm sure people smarter than me will figure out how to install repeaters to keep the food capsules moving and prevent a cheeseburger-traffic-jam 1000 miles below sea level. :-)

protomyth6• 16 years ago

Because cargo ships for food stuff are cheap and well understood.

nodata• 16 years ago

Because poor countries aren't hungry due to lack of food, they're hungry for political and economic reasons.

protomyth6• 16 years ago

I assume, give there description, that we are only talking terminal transportation at the city level (as the pipeline to get crops to mills is mostly field -> truck -> elevator -> 125 car train / barge).

I can't help but think replacing the current local delivery vehicles with electric would be cheaper and require less infrastructure changes. It would actually work better for electric vehicles since the routes are known and charge times can be scheduled.

If your going to build something like this, then just make it tall enough for autonomous cargo carrying robots so you can transport people, food, and packages year round.

radu_floricica2• 16 years ago

Remember the "last mile" problem in the internet years? Now try scaling it from wire to container.

This is the typical example of something which seems to make a lot of sense, but well, doesn't. Exactly at which level would this be better then the current system?

Long distances - why is it better then rail? It's a lot more expensive, but the upsides are few and far between.

Medium distances - the equivalent of public transport for merchandise. You'd have to set up "distribution stations" for this to work, and you'll run all too often in a situation where you drive the merchandise to a station 1-2 km away, transport it by tube to the next station, maybe 15 km away, and then drive it again to the final destination. It's simpler and cheaper to just drive the damn thing all the way.

As for a "last mile" type of solution... I doubt there's any city which really wants to invest in this.

Ripster2• 16 years ago

Some engineers spent years of their careers studying this problem. How long did it take you to reach the conclusion that it is not viable?

ceejayoz• 16 years ago

People have spent years studying all sorts of things that are impractical to implement in the real world.

radu_floricica2• 16 years ago

15 minutes? :) Joking, joking

I used to think this is a great idea too, and got all enthusiastic about it. Somehow I changed my mind, no idea why... maybe trying to think about it being cost effective? I'm not completely outside the problem either: a few years ago a co-founded a small courier company, so I did spend some time thinking about how to best move stuff in a big city.

Right now I'd say the right way to go about things is more computing power. A "swarm" of couriers can probably be efficient and cost effective enough. The real break will come when we can have cars that drive themselves, so you don't even have to pay a full time human to move packages around.

But digging holes? In the few instances where you can actually do it, they're great. It's just that I really doubt it's at all scalable.

speleding2• 16 years ago

More expensive than rails? There may be good arguments against this system, but this is not one of them. Unless you are talking about building a railroad in the desert the cost of pushing a pipe in the ground (which can even be done without opening up the street for a small diameter) is certainly much lower than acquiring right of way alone, not to mention building all the support infrastructure such as bridges, etc.

Ripster2• 16 years ago

This idea has been around since the 50's under various forms and will someday change the world as we know it. It is mostly known as Personal Rapid transit (PRT) and can be used to trasport food, waste, and all sorts of cargo including people at 1/2 of the cost of any other transport system (bikes can be cheaper). See www.personalrapidtransport.com (not a commercial site, just advocacy).

pyrhho• 16 years ago

Link is broken for me. Relevant wikipedia page for those interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit

ippisl• 16 years ago

I have seen much more competitive solutions for large parts of this problem(from the green perspective). for example assemblon's hydrogen storage solution(hydronol). assemblon claims that for $100 million they could build a truck fueling network that would span the u.s. . compare this for foodtubes ~7Billion for the greater london(altought including last mile).

Also , this kind of project requires public investment. since it would be fully automated ,it would probably take a lot of driving jobs.This would be a hard sell for a public entity in a democratic country.

protomyth6• 16 years ago

Their presentation video in the article is probably one of the worst examples of how to show off your new idea. It is confusing and has some phrases that might seriously lead your discussion off track (e.g. "FTUBES are more eco-friendly and economic than road building"). Never mind the early geocities-web-style-put-to-video feel.

flogic• 16 years ago

It's a cute idea. Though I think the limiting part is the tube itself. Installing underground tubes is going to be expensive. Maybe it would make more sense to forgo the tube and just use electric vehicles. You could install overhead power lines in some of the busier corridors. Delivery vehicles could trolley along until the last half or quarter mile. Then, they'd have to switch to batteries.

shalmanese• 16 years ago

This is retarded. In the same way that the "vertical farming", lets grow all our crops in skyscrapers idea that was spreading around a few months ago was retarded (http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/08/16/towering-lunacy/).

Simple logic from first principles can prove this. How much does food cost per pound? Somewhere around $5 a pound seems like a roughly good estimate. How much of this is transportation costs? Somewhere around 10% is a figure that is commonly cited. Even ignoring the fact that most of this transportation cost is "last mile", which the tubes can't solve, you're still envisioning a plan in which tubes can transport goods at 50 cents a pound and still break even.

If we were able to transport goods for 50 cents a pound then, guess what, we've obsoleted a whole lot more industries than just food. People, for one, are a lot more valuable, even mail is more valuable. There's a reason why we don't have subways running through every one of our cities and that's because digging tunnels is freakishly more expensive than what this plan is envisioning.

mhb• 16 years ago

Maybe there are some lessons in the Denver International Airport baggage system:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/26/world/americas/26iht-denve...

hexley• 16 years ago

Will it be maintainable? What happens when there's a collision and we have a pile of milk and rotting eggs stuck in the most inconvenient place possible?

protomyth6• 16 years ago

I would expect that it will not be pleasant and the chain reaction will make the news. It should be noted that this did happen in the not too distant past with the rail system in the US. I know of at least one car filled with soybeans that sat on some side track in the middle of nowhere for multiple (6+) months.

Story: At one point, I worked at a company that did clinical trials. They had this great computer controlled track with multiple cars that delivered all the samples to each lab (1 self powered car per sample). It could go straight up / flip over and the sample never tipped.

One day, a sample didn't arrive at one of the labs. It was frozen and we needed to get to it before it thawed as it, shall we say, wasn't a liquid. We traced the track an finally found it Alien's style when I turned a slow 180 with the flashlight as I was about half in the ceiling standing on a ladder. It had stopped because a rather large rat had not avoided getting hit by the car. I did not, at any point, think this was a logical consequence of my choice of professions.

GiraffeNecktie• 16 years ago

I wonder what they meant to say when they wrote this sentence "Huge quantities of diesel are burned to move food trucks—17 billion for each 25 million UK homes, which represents eight percent of all the carbon dioxide mixed into the atmosphere."

17 billion trucks for each 25 million UK homes? Wow!

pbhjpbhj• 16 years ago

>17 billion for each 25 million UK homes

Presumably "17 billion [litres of diesel each year to serve] [strike: for each] 25 million UK homes"?

Semiapies• 16 years ago

I can see some potential value in applying networking principles to cargo transport (or at least, more so than they have been ).

However, transportation is a tiny portion of the cost and ecological impact of agriculture. Massive efforts to try to address merely that small fraction of costs/harm are misguided.

Not that I can't see the appeal to businesses - instead of having to pay gas taxes, etc., you get taxpayers to foot your goods transport for you. (You "own" a section of the pipe, but big deal.) Furthermore, being an established player who gets food piped straight to you gives you a huge advantage over any upstart entrant into the market, since they won't get piped to without additional spending that the public will be disinterested in supporting and that your lobbyists can torpedo.

johngalt• 16 years ago

First ask yourself why the old tubes built in the 1800s were abandoned. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube

M1573RMU74710N• 16 years ago

Yea, but what happens when the kids break into the tubes and get into the softening jelly* ?

*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZeIBd2b_rU

spectre• 16 years ago

I'm dubious of how such a system would stand up during an earthquake. As a member of Civil Defence in a city that was recently struck by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Canterbury_earthquake) it was remarkable how with just a bulldozer any damaged transport routes could be returned to mostly usable condition. I shudder to think what would happen if we had been reliant on something like these foodtubes, image how long a minor displacement would take to fix.

Foodtube - transporting food like oil, water, and gas.

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