http://www.tfhrc.gov/pubrds/fall94/p94au21.htm
I almost died laughing…[:D][:D][:D] but this is a real study
Your Tax Dollers at work...Federal Highway Adminstration study on Pnumatic Tube Transport forfreight
Could be useful – if powered by the hot air that eminates from Washington DC.[;)]
dd
As far as Kyoto goes, one often wonders who make the most air pollution. Politicians or coal powered plants? Which to get rid of?
This innovation shows that a balanced transportation system should blow as well as suck.
note the date on the article - Fall 1994. This will be consigned to the growing pile of “great ideas” that never make it past the concept stage. Science doesn’t drive technology – economics does.
dd
How much was spent? Actually?
I guess they were blown away by the airy results of the survey.
The important question: did it work?
I’m reminded of a story about a building with both speaking tubes and pneumatic message tubes. There were some interesting results from the two becoming confused…
Seems logical to me? Why couldn’t this work?
How many billions would it cost to duplacate the national railroad freight network with this concept? And then how many more to duplicate as an addition the on-the-road trucking network?
On a smaller scale, say citywide and say air-frieght and air-mail which is generally lighter, something like this is a great idea for a company like USPS, UPS or Fed Ex, packages could arrive at the airport, be loaded onto tubes and sent to various distrubution hubs thruout the city, from there the packages could be delivered via truck or postal service. It could also be applied to a range of other frieght types, If it was applied like the Chicago city tunnel system, or an above ground type system, where mail, frieght, packages, etc. instead of being shipped by truck are send via an automated tube system it could takes a few trucks off the road. The idea being take the trucks off the longer distance deliverys using the underground system and use the trucks for local delivery only. But Alas, good ideas dont mean a thing unless someones willing to foot the bill and these days NO ONE wants to pay for anything, no matter how many vehicles it takes off the road. From idea to funding is a very different discussion.
Also the cost of tunneling these days would make this prohibitive.
BTW as a national system, forget it, waaaaaay too big, waaaaay too $$$. this would only work on the small scale here.
Well the Postal Service could use this to replace the postman…Mail would arive by truck or train to a central downtown terminal and be sucked through a network of pnumatic tubes to your frony door
Sounds like someone’s been applying a little too much pneumatic pressure to a glass pipe all right…
I’m not sure that’d be such a good idea - can see the headlines now: “Man injured by parcel”…
Got a 10KG parcel yesterday - if that had come via pneumatic tube it’d probably have gone straight through the wall[:D]
Don’t laugh. It’s a serious proposal. Here are more links:
http://tti.tamu.edu/researcher/newsletter.asp?vol=36&issue=2&article=2
http://www.tubexpress.com/tubexpress.htm
http://www.transportvisions.org.uk/trendsnovel.htm
http://www.canadiancontent.net/dir/Top/Science/Technology/Transportation/Tube-Based/
This one has links to a lot of sites:
Not really a new idea.
The British PO had such a system for mail in London 100 years ago or more. I don’t have a refernece, but will try to look it up.