> their groceries won’t make it to the stores and packages won’t get to their homes without a robust road network.
A road network isn't the only solution. In the early 20th century, for example, there was a separate narrow-gauge tunnel network beneath Chicago dedicated to freight. Deliveries were made directly to businesses via subbasements or elevator shafts. The network had stations at rail and ship terminals for accepting freight arriving from outside the city. At its height in 1929, the network had 150 locomotives pulling 10 to 15 cars per train.
This is neat but also seems like an insane solution to the problem of “I don’t like seeing service trucks”. How many such tunnels and elevators would it take to supply the buildings in a typical city’s downtown area?
> Eliminating cars doesn’t eliminate the need for infrastructure for moving goods.
Burying other last mile utilities that waste less land was not insane when real estate was a fraction as valuable as now and engineering technology was worse.
When I see bad faith arguments like this I earnestly worry that maybe sometimes I do the same and just don’t recognize it.
Did you read my comment about the cost of laying fiber being far different from the cost of digging truck-sized tunnels and make a conscious choice to pretend I was making a nonsense argument about diesel-powered fiber, or did you construct this strawman without realizing it?
I don't think you are trying to look at it rationally but simply in terms of priors where sprawl has cost an immense amount of resources. A tunnel where 2 pallets can cross is not much larger than a sewer, fits bellow a pedestrian/emergency vehicle system and is more valuable than a larger tunnel because it can never be DoT approved.
I wonder how many people such an automated freight system would kill per year, compared to cars in the same cities. Once we have some numbers, you would probably reconsider the use of "insane" there.
Sure. In 2022, 672 pedestrians were killed by large trucks. How many of those do you believe happened in say New York City? And how many of those do you think you could eliminate with this hypothetical tunnel system? And how much will this hypothetical tunnel system cost?
New York has about 300 pedestrian deaths total from all vehicles every year. So my guesstimate is that if you eliminated all of the trucks from New York City, you might save 50 lives a year, max. I would also guesstimate that it would probably cost well north of $50 billion to create this tunnel system to connect all of the major buildings in New York City. So we’re looking at about $1 billion per life saved. I bet you could save more than one life per billion if you put that money somewhere more useful.
> What do you think, ready to imagine such a comparison?
What are you intending to accomplish with your snarky and condescending tone?
it is not possible to eliminate the risk from the absolute requirement to move heavy bulk stuff, through and in citys.
roads need work, big things break and fail ,wherever they are, new stuff gets built, again, precisly, wherever, it gets built.
civil engineering is completly mature,and wildly boreing,and will dry your eyes out.
much of the cannon is millenia old, with fuck all room to "inovate"
and what works in one place, is a total fail somewhere else.
what is more is that the ancient world is littered with the ruins of civilisations and citys, that did fail, and in every case part or all of that failure was to overextend, undermaintain, there infrastructure, or worse, jump to some new flashy thing that then fails, spectacularly.
having walked through those ruins, and marvled at there engineering and planning of infrastructure, and also become a keen reader of all things civil or infrastructure engineerin, and also aircraft engineering, where the most important concept is up front, "failure mode", I have no respect for sudden ideas, and approve of what China has done to prohibit un educated comentary on infrastructure development and implimentation.
"influencer engineering" by way of "saftey"
Nitpick: it is one life per year for the billion invested. Which after the typical metro infrastructure lifespan of a century is actually viable because the cost for a working-age US life in medical and other contexts is probably around the $10mn ballpark.
(Assuming financing happens cheaply by the federal state rather than via PPP grift; and assuming that $50bn is the number, which in NYC is an underestimate by a factor of at least five…)
That’s a really good point. This is all very back-of-the-envelope, but if the total cost per life saved were 10 million it gets into the ballpark of sane.
But as you noted this 50 billion is likely a major underestimate (for comparison the recently built SR-99 tunnel in Seattle cost 1 billion per linear mile and connects to approximately zero buildings via elevators). NYC covers 300 square miles and estimates are that there are upwards of a million buildings across 120k city blocks.
How much will those robots cost? How many will we be able to make within the next 30 years?
How will they be autonomous considering bipedal operation in random environments is MUCH, MUCH harder that full self driving for cars on public roads? And that's just moving around, we're talking about actual judgement to do a human job that requires reasoning and practical skills.
Jetson type robots are a pipe dream at this point. I don't expect to have a robot maid within my lifetime.
Let's be realistic and not plan society today around scifi fantasies, please.
We're probably lacking 80% of the basic science needed for autonomous robot maids.
Right. My comment wasn't about maids from the Jetsons. General purpose robots are not soon. But for more specific tasks we've come very far in the last decade.
Warehouse automation is a reality today. Package delivery is also, just not broadly across the US. But it is very much happening right now.
Specifically my comment was about package delivery, which appears to be around the corner for most major cities, and already in place in several major cities around the world.
For indoor delivery, you don't really need Atlas. A 4 wheeled "full self drive" can fairly easily navigate cubicles and press elevator buttons. It's really not that crazy, and doesn't require any reasoning whatsoever. Basic preprogrammed pathfinding borrowed from any modern video game works fine for this. I don't think you need any advanced AI, let alone AGI.
Also perhaps worth mentioning in Chicago is Lower Wacker Drive.
It's a split-level street, more-or-less with local traffic on the surface and with through traffic at the subterranean level. It's a quick way to get through the area.
And beneath parts of that that is an road I've heard referred to as Lower Lower Wacker. This is almost entirely the realm of delivery and service vehicles (except for a time in fairly recent years when those darned kids were using it for drag racing at night).
It's all crazy-expensive to build anything like underground local delivery rail and underground roadways.
(But the stuff at the surface is crazy-expensive, too, and often can't be expanded horizontally without demolition of the very buildings that it seeks to benefit.
But expanding down? Sometimes, yeah -- that can happen.)
A road network isn't the only solution. In the early 20th century, for example, there was a separate narrow-gauge tunnel network beneath Chicago dedicated to freight. Deliveries were made directly to businesses via subbasements or elevator shafts. The network had stations at rail and ship terminals for accepting freight arriving from outside the city. At its height in 1929, the network had 150 locomotives pulling 10 to 15 cars per train.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company