A group of academics is proposing a system of underground tunnels which could deliver food and other goods in all weathers with massive energy savings.
The Foodtubes group wants to put goods in metal capsules 2m long, which are shifted through underground polyethylene tubes at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour, directed by linear induction motors and routed by intelligent software to their destinations.
The group, which includes an Oxford physics professor and logistics experts, wants £15 million to build a £5 mile test circuit, and believes the scheme could fund itself if used by large supermarkets and local councils, and could expand because it uses an open architecture.
On a more practical scale, the group has developed a plan for the London borough of Croydon, which would link all the food outlets, schools and other major buildings in the London borough of Croydon. “It would cost £400 million to build and, if run by the council or a consortium, it would make £80 million a year,” said Hodson, who says Transport for London has also expressed an interest.
The proposal uses lightweight capsules, which are roughly the same size as the cages that are carried by supermarket lorries, Hodson explained. They are moved by an electromagnetic “kick” from linear induction motors built into the side of the underground tubes and, at junctions, are steered one way or another by other linear motors operating under computer control.
The group moved to linear induction motors, when it realised that vacuum power, normally used in smaller capsule transport systems, would be impractical on this scale.
The energy savings over road distribution would be huge, since around 92 percent of the diesel burnt by a lorry is used to transport the vehicle itself, which spends much of its time driving around almost empty. As well as this, increasing amounts of the electricity used by the system could come from green sources, said Hodson.
“It’s a difficult project to take forward, as it is innovative and involves new infrastructure,” said Hodson, in something of an understantement. “Governments shudder at getting involved, and research and development funding is scarce.”
However, he believes that a couple of large retailers would be enough to get it off the ground. “We do have communications with a major supermarket group,” he said.
Other members of the team include Fred Taylor, Halley professor of physics at Oxford University, and logistics consultant Jonathan Carter, who lectures at Imperial College London.
The idea could play well with ideas from IBM, which addressed green transport at its Start summit earlier this year and HP which wants to instrument the world with trillions of sensors.
Ironically, however, the first interest may come from companies who stand to suffer if lorries are made obsolete. Foodtubes is talking to two oil firms about providing a system to supply remote stations in the permafrost of Canada, and in the deserts of the Middle East, said Hodson.
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Croydon? How about a pilot somewhere which actually has problems e.g. no public transport, get cut-off in bad weather, no shops. North Oxfordshire villages spring to mind...
Croydon is a remote desolate place with poor transport, cut off in bad weather and no real shops to speak of!
Pair it with railways for the long halls and it would be a very eficient system,
John's comment is very apropos. It is by combining it with a different network, ie the rail network, that you get an internet. Inter network connections are the whole point behind IP. Before then, your various local networks with their own protocols did not exchange data very well. Just try connecting the original token ring and ethernet natively to each other.
Two issues not mentioned - this only makes sense in areas of high population density, and there must be a large infrastructure at the input end. In places where the population density is high, the land is usually expensive. If the hub is located further away where the land is cheaper, the distances increase and the cost efficiency decreases. This may work in some areas, but I wouldn't think it's a panacea for transportation problems.
Will they measure efficiency by how many bites you can fit in the capsules?
Beer please! Ploink! Awesome...
Good point Karl. Technically it's not in Internet till the capsules transfer onto other transports, perhaps packing into shipping containers for long journeys.
It is a packet-switching network, though, if we want a data analogy....
Peter Judge
eWEEK Europe UK
I like the idea, but this isn't new. Jacque Fresco of the Venus Project has proposed this and many other ideas for over thirty years ago.
To the comment below. You are thinking inside the box. Why would you need a large base infrastructure at the input. The input would be the distributers, which would get their products from the manufacturers which is one way traffic. Planning and logistist is very trivial in this matter even for imported items. If you roll this out slowly "where" you are located is not a issue either(exact same way Time Warner and Verizon have been rolling out their fiber networks). This is not talking about transport to peoples homes, just to retailers. Job loss is not a problem either as you can just retrain persons to a new area.
Two issues not mentioned – this only makes sense in areas of high population density, and there must be a large infrastructure at the input end. In places where the population density is high, the land is usually expensive. If the hub is located further away where the land is cheaper, the distances increase and the cost efficiency decreases. This may work in some areas, but I wouldn’t think it’s a panacea for transportation problems.
Thank David, the Venus Project has a very nice-looking site - thanks for adding that to my radar.
http://thevenusproject.com/technology/transportation
But I don't see anything there about underground tubes, and it doesn't look as if the project is trying to get funding for pilots and roll-out.
Peter Judge
eWEEK Europe UK
There's a few interesting challenges in a system like this. Certainly, there's quite a cost outlay in putting something like this into the ground in the first place, but I find myself wondering how much it'd cost to maintain over time, not to mention how fault-tolerant it's going to be.
Power failures, groundwater leaks, capsule malfunctions, spills, vermin, deliberate sabotage, idiots with backhoes - any such system would have to account for things like this happening, and have protocols in place to make sure that they don't significantly disrupt infrastructure.
One of the problems I find with the Venus Project is that they're far, far too high-level and don't seem to have a very solid trajectory for bringing about their grand utopian vision, either technologically or sociopolitically. It's nice to dream, I guess, but I'd rather see more of a plan than simply a goal.
The Foodtubes group at least seems to have more in the way of engineering expertise to start off with (even if that doesn't extend as far as web design principles). I'll be interested to see how they progress.