I idly wonder if what would actually make sense here is a hybrid model that combines a gigantic fulfillment center with tens of thousands of products located "far" from people, with a large physical footprint and near to road/rail arteries, but with a mid-bandwidth, high-granularity, low-latency physical link to "near" places.

For example, imagine you had an upscaled pneumatic tube system (don't get hung up on the exact implementation, it could be a small gauge train system or conveyer belt: whatever floats your Factorio-addled boat) with a diameter around, say, half a metre to a metre, packed goods into canisters and shot into town where they pop out at local distribution centres for pickup or last-mile delivery.

This is where I thought the Boring Company might be going back before it was obvious it was an anti-public transit gambit.

Possibly the curse of rail systems applies where the maintenance of the track (tube) costs so much that it's cheaper to fly (done delivery) or drive all the way on public roads (current solution). The advantage over rail is that the land footprint is very small: the tract is about a metre wide and can be buried if needed. Perhaps it's just not really different enough to trucking it all into town using semi trailers, which would still be required for large items and especially construction materials.

Then again, even if this hare-brained system were to work, this assumes we actually want to continue to reduce most human commercial interactions to gigantic, remote, anonymous capital-intensive megasystems producing pods that pop out of the ground into robotic vending stations.

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MattExact 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

This is pretty much exactly what Ocado already do, at least in the UK.

They have 4 CFCs and 15-20 "spokes".

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pjc50 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Buried anything is just horrendously expensive. Partly because of other things that are already buried.

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georgefrowny 2 days ago | parent [-]

Sure, but "we're going to cut the costs of horizontal drilling to a tiny fraction" was the Boring Company's original stated goal. And not all of it does need to be underground.

Even if it was a good idea (which I doubt, it's just a idle thought), I don't think there's a practical way to retrofit such a system in existing cities due to the costs, planning and presumably private funding for a non-public network, because the public road system exists, needs to continue to exist for large items and can be used for virtually free in comparison. So if/when the depot-to-neighbourhood leg is automated, it's much more likely we'll see drone vehicles on the road or occasionally in the air instead of dedicated pipeline-like delivery systems.

Even without the pipeline, you can conceive of self-diving heavy vehicles pulling up next to local delivery hubs and disgorging thousands of shipping pods into a robotic receiver. From there they either get picked up, droned, Starship'ed, cycled, whatever to the eventual front door. It's still possible just having then self-drive right to the door would turn out cheaper.

Sounds very sterile as an experience, but really it's only an optimisation of the small, but highly distributed, remaining segment of inefficiency in the existing global machine that already converts raw materials to a widget or food and gets it to within 100 miles of your house.

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tstrimple 2 days ago | parent [-]

> Sure, but "we're going to cut the costs of horizontal drilling to a tiny fraction" was the Boring Company's original stated goal.

Sounds like the sort of idea a con man would pitch. Oh wait...

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georgefrowny 2 days ago | parent [-]

To be fair, he did do that for kilos to orbit via reusable rocket, so there was a moment when everyone went "hmm maybe there is a TBM equivalent of the Falcon 9".

But presumably it turned out that actually Herrenknecht and Hitachi aren't stupid, whereas, say, Boeing had been leaving opportunity for radical cost reduction on the table.

	▲	marcosdumay 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		There existed a well known path for reducing costs to orbit, and the market was non-competitive and highly non-optimized for decades. One single company made a single experiment in that path, and it was somewhere on the middle between success and failure. That's not the case for drilling. The Boring Company has no clear proposition about how they would reduce their costs.