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An underground delivery train comes to the Atlanta suburbs

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Re: An underground delivery train comes to the Atlanta suburbs

#161

Post by TylerE »

dingnuts wrote: post #133
NegativeLatency wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic straw man argument, there's a pretty big difference from a walkable and incrementally more dense neighborhood and Manhattan. We're not going to tear down and rebuild everything all at once, it's going to take time and work to get us out of the massive car dependent hole we've dug for ourselves. It seems Atlanta has massively oversupplied (to it's own detriment) parking and prioritized space for cars, and negl…

Your quote only adds to the GP's point -- Atlanta is so far from being walkable that it will take half a century of very good urban planning before the problem solved by the article is solved in the way that would make the r/fuckcars posters that show up in every thread on this site about transportation would like it to be. People arguing that Atlanta should just permit "denser and mixed-use development, so employees…

Yeah, 5 minutes outside in the summer heat would change their mind on that. Walk even a few blocks in August and you a shower.

Re: An underground delivery train comes to the Atlanta suburbs

#162

Post by anarticle »

Looks interesting, trenching that will probably not be fun. Hope it works out, esp getting city to work with them. The first one to solve this idea is probably the next trillion dollar company.

Surprised no one has mentioned Zipline yet, the drone startup that got their start in Rwanda with gliders delivering blood by air. They went on to make a quiet drone that uses a cable attached pod to accurately place deliveries:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOWDNBu9DkU

Re: An underground delivery train comes to the Atlanta suburbs

#163

Post by cameronh90 »

keyboard_slap wrote: post #98

What problem is this system trying to solve? It seems to be, in this initial deployment, that the office park is too far away from the restaurants its employees want to visit, compelling them to drive there. I feel like a better solution would be permitting denser and mixed-use development, so employees can walk to their favorite restaurants on the ground floor instead of driving >1km to them or paying for a delivery…

I live in London, and it’s very walkable and dense here compared to most US cities. Nevertheless, almost every vehicle is a delivery vehicle of some kind. Uber Eats deliveries and Amazon packages going everywhere all the time.

Some sort of city-wide underground packet switched (literally) delivery network sounds sadly impractical but would be amazing and take a huge amount of traffic off the road.

Re: An underground delivery train comes to the Atlanta suburbs

#164

Post by cameronh90 »

cpursley wrote: post #110
pavel_lishin wrote: post #101

> The pipe is 18 inches wide — large enough to fit 40 banana Americans will use literally anything except the metric system. And bicycles, I guess.

Heck, try to get them to use their legs. We had neighbors two houses over that would always DRIVE to visit us - from their house. They thought our car was broken down whenever I walked half a mile to the grocery. America is weird.

To be fair, when I visited the USA, a cop threatened to fine me for jaywalking until he realised I was British. He then gave me a lift to my destination, because apparently the hood I was in was so dangerous that there was a real chance that I might end up getting shot.

That was the last time I ever tried walking in LA.

Re: An underground delivery train comes to the Atlanta suburbs

#165

Post by keyboard_slap »

sfifs wrote: post #155
keyboard_slap wrote: post #98

What problem is this system trying to solve? It seems to be, in this initial deployment, that the office park is too far away from the restaurants its employees want to visit, compelling them to drive there. I feel like a better solution would be permitting denser and mixed-use development, so employees can walk to their favorite restaurants on the ground floor instead of driving >1km to them or paying for a delivery…

The answer to this is actually very simple and used all over the world by shopping centres and shopping district associations. You just run a free loop bus for a few hours during lunch time to bring people to and from the shopping district. Even in the US I have seen airport hotels do this in NY, SF and LA. I wonder why the default answer in US is often not simple public transport.

Because most public transit simply isn't profitable

Re: An underground delivery train comes to the Atlanta suburbs

#166

Post by oooyay »

jstarfish wrote: post #83
oooyay wrote: post #61

When I worked in sewer inspection I heard a lot about the rate of degradation of in-ground infrastructure. One thing that was touted a lot was that the math doesn't work out at present; we can't replace infrastructure as fast as it degrades in net. I was curious if the 10 years since I've been NAASCO certified if things have changed or if non-water/sewer infrastructure was potentially different. Turns out, costs aver…

I'm curious if Atlanta has the same issues as you're familiar with. Under a thin layer of topsoil the ground is impermeable clay, and they don't have earthquakes. Known problems with the sewer systems go neglected without incident for decades.

I'm just kind of spitballing this but:

Depending on when the pipe is laid (and sometimes you don't have a choice) if the clay is dry and then gets wet and expands it could crack the pipe. A cracked interior will always spread.

Clay, when dry, is rigid and I would think if the earth moves it's probably going to shove the pipe rather than move around it. That'd probably cause the pipe to either fracture or dislodge.

Even if none of the above happens that means that if they pipe does develop a defect for something more common (eg: a tree root intruding) then the running water will be split. It'd cause the clay on the bottom part of the pipe to begin to wash away either back into the pipe or it'll find porous material to seep through eventually eroding the structural support of the pipe. I've seen situations like this that basically create mini cave systems and the surface of the earth will appear in-tact until something heavy drives over it.

That said, I never worked in Atlanta so I'm not familiar with what defects or the infrastructure look like there.

Re: An underground delivery train comes to the Atlanta suburbs

#168

Post by pylua »

yawnxyz wrote: post #156
dingnuts wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your quote only adds to the GP's point -- Atlanta is so far from being walkable that it will take half a century of very good urban planning before the problem solved by the article is solved in the way that would make the r/fuckcars posters that show up in every thread on this site about transportation would like it to be. People arguing that Atlanta should just permit "denser and mixed-use development, so employees…

Most people move to Atlanta for the burbs! They move away from dense cities like Manhattan to have a yard and some space, without having to pay a lot of money for it, but still be close enough to the city. But the jobs are all in the city, and they all want to drive in, which is why traffic sucks and midtown/downtown is one big parking lot.

I don’t think they all want to drive in. There’s no choice. For instance if you live in Gwinnett you have to commute to doraville for rail— it’s not a giant time save if at all any time save. They said it would take 30 years to get heavy rail to Duluth at a minimum ! Maybe my grandkids could benefit.

There’s also missing Marta stops such as Atlantic station, Cobb galleria, and ponce city market. Using the buses seems to be the short term work around but it is rather absurd.

Re: An underground delivery train comes to the Atlanta suburbs

#169

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #105
Deprecate9151 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think for the pharmacists its simply economics. It's cheaper to have 3 or 4 pharmacists and a bunch of much lower payed techs on staff to do the work manually then develop and maintain automation while complying with existing regulations. I know some hospitals have automatic medication dispensing, so I'm assuming they have much higher volume where it makes sense.

Pharmacists can also catch obviously-wrong prescriptions - "This should be milligrams, not grams. If you take 20 grams of this, you'll die, in a spectacular and gruesome fashion." (Granted, pharmacists can also miss things like this - which is why technology, checklists and humans working together are probably the best solution.)

I can't think of any situation where detection of things like wrong dosages, drug interactions, incorrect prescriptions, etc. couldn't be better tracked and identified by an automated system than a human.

Re: An underground delivery train comes to the Atlanta suburbs

#170

Post by [deleted] »

keyboard_slap wrote: post #98

What problem is this system trying to solve? It seems to be, in this initial deployment, that the office park is too far away from the restaurants its employees want to visit, compelling them to drive there. I feel like a better solution would be permitting denser and mixed-use development, so employees can walk to their favorite restaurants on the ground floor instead of driving >1km to them or paying for a delivery…

[deleted]
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