Georgia will literally do anything to avoid doing rail infrastructure
Yup visited Atlanta, and boy does that city need a subway and light rail system in the worst fucking way. Also every major Texas city! You have to deal with traffic if you want to do anything. It’s honestly stressful.
Dallas has a light rail system and it’s growing. They need to do more but it’s gotten much better over the last few decades
Wouldn’t it be more efficient to use rails on the surface? Like a monorail or something similar, digging stuff out is very energy inefficient compared to just building it on top.
If it is on the surface it needs to mix with humans. safety becomes a hard problem. run underground and your safety becomes the simple there is nobody there - if there was the power would have been cut and so the vehicles can’t move.
Counter point, fire. If one thing catches fire down there the tube is fucked. And might collapse.
But nobody is there so insurance replaces the package and you dig a new tunnel.
Why would insurance not cover accidents on the surface? That makes no sense, and a tube collapse would be a problem for whatever is above.
Insurance cannot bring a dead person back to life. It can give the heirs money, but that is not the same. On the surface humans will need to cross the roads and we don’t know how to do that safely. In tunnels humans will never need to cross these vehicles and thus it is much easier to not kill someone.
Idk man, a tram ain’t killing hundreds of people either
And no insurance will cover something that will get destroyed completely in a minor accident.
Trams have drivers to hit the emergency stop.
You can get insurance to cover whatever you want. Normally it isn’t cost effective to get insurance for small losses from a minor accident, but you can get it if you really want (you will need to see a specialty provider)
Bahahaha Georgia can’t even stop their local government from getting hacked and they wanna add MORE tech?
Bahhaahaha
It’s probably impractical to build these tunnels to everyone’s front door, but they might make sense if they worked like train networks and journeys terminated at local stations. That way the last few hundred meters could be above ground.
If this were ever to take off I wonder how it would be financed? The cost of infrastructure like this would rival the money spent on rail and road projects.
Most people already have saveral tunnles to there house. Electric, tv, phone, internet, water, community heat, natural gas, and sewer. Nobody gets all of that list, but select 3-5 is very common.
small tunnels are cheap enough. cost goes up by size.
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For everyone who didn’t bother reading the (very short) article, it’s in Peachtree Corners, it’s 1 tunnel about 1.5km long and 2m below ground.
The connection allows staff at the city’s “Curiosity Lab” complex to order lunch from some businesses in the connected shopping center.
Conceptually it could make sense to reduce urban traffic from frequent point to point deliveries, but no, this isn’t going to deliver Amazon packages into your living room.
This is incredibly impractical, and no way this is economically feasible for home delivery of goods. This might be somehow practical for moving large quantities of highly valuable items (think hospitals transferring drugsor blood/plasma) over predictable paths regularly in a large, urban area, but the need for that must be relatively infrequent to how much it would cost to maintain a system as described here.
If robots are also building the tunnels it could be economically feasible 🤷
I mean, it depends on how deep they go and the type of soil/dirt they need to go through. I don’t know where this town is (too lazy to research that right now… It’s New Year’s Day, give me a break LOL) but much of Georgia is loose, iron-rich (very red! Like digging a hole out of rust) dirt/sand (the awful-feeling large grain kind) like 20-30ft deep. It’s easy to dig but hard to make a stable tunnel through (it’d just collapse).
If they are just shoving a thin steel “tube” (rectangular like the picture in the article) into the ground and forcing the dirt out (e.g. blow it out with air) that could be very cheap. It’d be like operating a really wide Ditch Witch.
