There are a lot of doubters in the threads here and I think a lot of it has to do with the generative art that accompanies the article. They haven't picked a technology and it may actually end up being driverless cars on dedicated lanes, or automated rail technology. The point is non-stop driverless tech. The country is very well aware of the coming labor shortage and is going to rely heavily on automation in the future.
Anyone who has ever stepped on a Shinkansen can understand that Japan has a way of getting shit done. It may start a bit later than other countries, but when they finally decide to execute (and this is still in planning stages so it might not), it happens surprisingly quickly.
I've watched them totally revamp Shibuya station over the past 10 years in ways that make it utterly unrecognisable to someone who hasn't been here since then, all while never taking down-time. There is another article on the HN front page titled "Why it takes NYC nearly 10 years to install 500 feet of pipes" right now... that's perhaps coloring people's expectations of the possible.
> They haven't picked a technology and it may actually end up being driverless cars on dedicated lanes, or automated rail technology.
Which completely undermines the title, hence the doubt.
If they haven’t picked a technology, they haven’t really done much more than express interest in having an option to do something. The talk about extremely long (and expensive) tunnels or conveyor belts feels silly when the obviously more economical solutions like autonomous trucks or traditional train rails are vastly cheaper.
The conveyor belt thing is just a PR stunt. Nobody could possibly think it’s a viable option compared to traditional alternatives.
The conveyor belt thing has a lot of momentum behind it. There's a push to created automated logistical grid that replaces TEUs with a smaller more manageable and routable standard. Self driving and traditional rail just have extraneous overhead that a basic conveyor with switching simplifies.
Well belt conveyor definitely isn't the right approach - it's about 1.5-2x more expensive than other types of pallet conveyor (e.g. chain) and is difficult to maintain (snapped belts etc). Line shaft is another option, but has similar drawbacks to chain at this scale.
Also bear in mind that pallet conveyor is slow - in most factories or warehouses where you are covering large distances the standard approach would actually be to put a rail guided vehicle in (often called a pallet monorail).
Plus conveyors would then need to be enclosed (they have lots of moving parts - it's not like train rails where you can just put them outside and let it get wet. The pallets also can't get wet, but it would take less infrastructure to cover the pallets than cover the full 310 mile route.).
A material ropeway would be another option - not commonly deployed but probably a much better fit for moving pallets across these sort of distances and much faster than conveyor (although still probably only 15-20 miles per hour!).
I think the skepticism comes from other companies and countries taking about using autonomous battery-powered sleds when the power of trains comes from the reduction to one or more traction units, which is far less complex.
If they have dedicated conveyor tracks* above grade the system makes sense, but this is expensive due to the costs of grade separation.
It's possible but probably the most expensive route.
* The tracks should probably be catenary or third rail, not battery.
> with the generative art that accompanies the article.
About that, I also noticed.-
Has anybody looked into how the lowering of the "illustration threshold" for visualizing ideas might influence how many, or which, or how hard it might be to bring them to reality? Or securing investment?
There’s a long history of users and consumers having unrealistic ideas of technology true capabilities. How many times have we encountered users who think poor quality images can be computer “enhanced” to show detail that’s not really there, because countless murder mystery movies and tv shows do exactly that?
The blurred line between fantasy/hallucinations and reality will only become worse, I fear.
The problem is to move small cargo between Tokyo and Osaka (500 km).
They end up choosing rail or light rail. Other options are just early spitballing for PR like they always do. They might go for narrow rails if land use is important. Steel rolling on steel track is just too good solution for that distance.
Other proposals like carts on a tunnel, converter belts are too slow or too expensive if fast enough.
Having small carts move on wheels just wears down the wheels in no time. Same for conveyor belts.
The cost of rail per km is cheaper than alternatives. They may end up loading wheeled carts on the train and wheel them off at destination, but they don't run them for 500 km.
The all other options listed are just for show and PR.
Conveyor belts are expensive to maintain. A family friend in WV was getting paid upwards of $150k a year in a town where most people lived in poverty simply because he was the guy to call when a coal mine's conveyor belt was broken. Not only was he paid so much because of the critical need (no coal coming out = no money coming in), but because every job was a big job since there was never much time for maintenance.
> [the guy] was getting paid upwards of $150k a year in a town where most people lived in poverty simply because he was the guy to call when a coal mine's conveyor belt was broken
So... most of the people there had to live in poverty just because that one guy gets paid so much for broken conveyor belts?
No, the town was in poverty because the business owners had leverage to squeeze most of the workers. Conveyor belt guy had the skillset and gumption to actually get paid for his labor, because there was no alternative.
Blame the corporation that squeezes its employees for every dime, not a front line worker who actually manages to get paid appropriate compensation.
Freight trains are great for moving huge quantities of freight from classification yard A to classification yard B (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_yard), not so great for moving smaller quantities door-to-door. Ever wondered why, despite the existence of freight trains, there are still so many long-haul trucks driving around? Because freight trains aren't the answer to all logistics questions!
So put a sorting conveyor belt at the end of a train line?
I could see a conveyor if and only if it saves a bunch of complexity at source /destination, or if it can be built in places that would be much more expensive to make trainlines. After all trains are just concentrated cargo, and are therefore much heavier.
> So put a sorting conveyor belt at the end of a train line?
Done right, a conveyor can fairly seamlessly branch off at arbitrary locations along the way. Individual items can fan out onto smaller sub-branches without any significant delays; a long train has to stop and start to accomplish the same.
I think the main challenge here would be the maintenance of such a thing. Rail requires plenty; a conveyor has many, many more moving parts over hundreds of miles.
Have you seen the automated sorting and distribution in a amazon warehouse? And yes, those are complex machines, but this way to build a logistics hub is way superior to 1:1 cranes. There is a difference between squential arrival and non-blocking sorting to various hubs to process. And arrival and blockign sequential move to a truck.
Sure and the mass of a package is what? 50lbs max?
Long distance = High volume = weight/mass.
The laws of physics aren't changing any time soon. redirecting a cargo container like a box shooting through a warehouse would not end well for some portion of the system (including the contents)
The idea is to replace TEUs with smaller more manageable standard though. Even though the art shows containers that's not what they are trying to do. In similar systems the proposal is like one cubic meter boxes with max of 100kg. Something easily manageable and can be switched and routed on a conveyor system.
> The idea is to replace TEUs with smaller more manageable standard though.
SO a pallet?
> proposal is like one cubic meter boxes with max of 100kg.
A pallet, the normal shitty wooden ones are rated for 10x that much mass. A cheap pallet jack is rated for 2500kg.
I get what they are proposing. But it is disconnected from the realities of distance and mass... If you need to move 10 pallets of water does it make sense to make 10 trips in your car or 1 trip in a truck? Breaking down goods into smaller units doesn't change the amount of cargo it just creates congestion... It's like a high speed network without jumbo frames.
> Ever wondered why, despite the existence of freight trains, there are still so many long-haul trucks driving around?
You don't think there aren't tons of spurs that drop 3-4 car loads of cargo on a semi frequent schedule? that there aren't spurs that move massive amounts of goods both in and out of production facilities?
Just in Time moved a lot of cargo off rails and into trucks... that market is going away now as more planed and centralized logistics comes back into style. Transport costs were out of control but no one was paying attention to them... not the case any more.
With all the recent research effort for self-driving cars, I wonder if there are also projects for self-driving rail cars that could cover the "last miles" to the destination without being part of a train. Of course, one problem is that in the last decades, most companies that might benefit from something like this were built on sites without rail connection...
Self driving trains have been in real world use for more than 20 years. What makes them easy compared to cars is with rail you just put a fence around the track and there is nothing else to hit so you don't need complex sensors to avoid killing people (more likely you put the tracks in a tunnel or elevated). Of course that gets into why we don't do this to individual houses - either the fences trap everybody in their own house (maybe they can visit a neighbor or 3, but not the whole neighborhood) or the costs to build it is extremely high.
Roads are dangerous, but also a lot more flexible than rail and so better for low volume use.
Like with roads rail requires a lot of maintenance if you put the heavy load on it. Having to shut down the transport periodically isn't good for business.
Perhaps with containers on rollers it is possible to replace one without shutting everything down. Kinda interesting puzzle, the rollers should fit in the containers. A telescope would make them to weak, picking up the old roller, rotating 90 degrees, bringing the new one, rotate 90 degrees, drop it in place.
Much better than the "AI" spamming, regurgitated garbage that's the current link.
Also, since neither article mentions it: The chief driver (pun not intended) behind this is new work regulations drastically limiting how many hours a truck driver can work. It's been called the "2024 Problem" because the law came into effect this year upending their trucking industry.
Each image has "pictured using generative tools" in the caption. I'm glad they are upfront about it not being a true idea of the concept, but I don't understand why New Atlas would use misleading GenAI images to when the Japan News article^1 has an informative graphic. The exaggeration in the text also makes me doubt their interpretation of the source article. It makes a lot of claims about self-driving capabilities and population decline that barely seem supported.
To all those snidely commenting about trains or rail: Do you think that Japan, of all places, is not familiar with railways? The article states that this is for palletized or small-package loads. Give them some credit.
It's what people call a "gadgetbahn": something that does the job of a railway, but not using railway technology, thereby introducing a whole load of unproven tech. This looks great in the AI renders but then turns out to make it infeasible.
> Currently the world's longest conveyor belt is 61km
100km. The article you linked used miles.
That one transfers the load between different sections of its length. The longest conveyer that does not transfers the load is 31km at Boddington Bauxite Mine in Australia.
> This is five times longer [...]
Does that actually introduce any new technical difficulties?
Suppose I needed a 2m x 1m table. I could get some 2m long boards and put enough in parallel to get my 1m width. I could put 1m boards perpendicular to those underneath at the ends and nail the 2m long boards to them. Then add legs at the 4 corners and I have a table.
Then I need a 5m x 1m table. I could take the same approach except using 5m boards instead of 2m boards. I might need to nail some more perpendiculars in the middle part of the table or maybe add some legs in the middle.
As I need longer and longer tables that approach keeps working up to maybe 10m. I don't think my local source of boards has boards longer than that.
So if I need a 30m x 1m table I need a new approach. I need to figure out something that doesn't require single boards that span the whole thing. It has to be limited to boards I can reasonably get. Let's say I figure out how to make that 30m x 1m table using no boards longer than 4m.
At that point I expect that I'd be able to build tables of any greater length by just doing whatever I did in the middle of the 30m table but doing more of that.
I'd expect that a similar thing happens when you build a 100km long conveyor. The specific project was "build a 100km long conveyor" but to solve it you figure out the solution to "build an arbitrarily long conveyor" and then apply that to "build a 100km long conveyor".
It worked out in Paris for quite a while, granted it was smaller than pallet workloads but still, a large physical object transportation network (akin to pneumatic tubes) was quite useful. IIRC the downfall was flooding combined with degraded infrastructure due to lack of maintenance, but those are procedural and planning issues, not foundational issues that cannot be overcome.
Similar smaller-than-container transportation networks exist elsewhere, even temporary ones used for evacuating tunnels while they are being bored. Even coal strip-mining type of situations have extremely long length conveyor systems that work pretty well.
If you forget the nonsense AI picture for a moment, what they are doing is essentially not much more than extra-specialised rail, which when built for a specific purpose makes a lot of sense, especially when you want to factor in autonomy, or per-object routing instead of single-train based routing. It's already done in factories too.
I'm not arguing you can make something like this work. However it will cost a lot of $$$ and in the end you won't have anything better than known freight trains. Even if you convince every [geographical area the size of Japan] to install one, the scale factors still won't make this better or cheaper than a train.
But that's the thing, it has already been done, already been proven and it does work. Roads and classic freight rail are not the only thing that are used right now that do this.
This won't actually happen. It's a "we're doing something about it" project that will spend a lot of money on planning and then not pan out (obviously, since the very premise is ludicrous).
Then they can say they're doing something about the shrinking worker problem and call it a day. No one need be shamed.
Reminds me of Robert A. Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll"[0] where highways were replaced by 100 mph moving sidewalks. It will be a bad day if some segments of the conveyor belt has issues and they need to take time to find alternative transport, not to mention large portions of the 310 miles of cargo stuck on there depending on where things go wrong.
If the trucks are used for last mile, as long as you have the same number of end destinations, don't you still need roughly the same amount of trucks? I'm assuming in trucking short-haul the largest amount of times are in receiving / dropping cargo and shortening the distance by 100 km doesn't make much difference but maybe it does?
In my mental model the trucks just have to go "somewhere else" to pick up the cargo, which might be a bit closer, but that's it?
Not necessarily. Because each container is an atomic unit, you can presort at the origin or some other point.
I’d envision this like the old USPS Railroad system. In those days they’d drop a sack of mail at each station and pick up outgoing mail with a hook without stopping. You’ll have small stations and you send the pallet off the main conveyor. That might be directly delivery, or a van or some other arrangement.
The big thing is you avoid cross docking and middlemen, LTL type freight.
The Swiss CST (Cargo Sous Terrain aka. Cargo Under Ground) is planning to have a first 70km tunnel between a major cargo hub (Härkingen) and the biggest city (Zürich) in Switzerland by 2031. The automated vehicles should to be driving some 30km/h. In the long term a underground system of 500km between the biggest cities is planned.
They’re looking for proposals, the title is misleading
> One possibility is to use massive conveyor belts to cover the 500-km (310-mile) distance between the two cities, running alongside the highway or potentially through tunnels underneath the road. Alternatively, the infrastructure could simply provide flat lanes or tunnels, and the pallets could be shifted by automated electric carts.
I remember being really impressed with Adelaide's public O-bahn bus service back in 1999, I'm sure it's improved since then and a quick google shows it still exists, so it's obviously been a success.
At the time these were slightly modified busses that could disconnect the steering (or maybe the driver just let go of the wheel), and were fitted with rubber bumpers and/or wheels on the corners (I can't quite remember) and drove in a concrete channel a bit wider than the bus, but not much, and the bus just kind of bounced off the wall until it settled in a straight line. The bus driver just disengaged the wheel and floored the accelerator and it sped along its section until it got to the suburb it needed to be, then he slowed down a bit, the walls got a bit further apart and he re-engaged the steering wheel and just carried on driving normally as the concrete sidewalls ended and it turned into normal road.
Looking at the pictures now, it seems they've revised this design a bit and there are now 2 sets of concrete channels that the wheels sit in and the concrete doesn't go high enough to require bumpers and just operates against the tyres instead. I guess they discovered that it didn't cause enough tyre wear to be a problem, or they have extra thick sidewall tyres or something. Also possible I've just misremembered that detail after 25 years!
Anyway, these weren't driverless, but there's no real reason why they couldn't be. They could just slow down and stop in a bay at the destination city and then have a driver hop in to take it the last leg of the journey. To fulfil their green ambitions they should maybe add charging and power rails to power the vehicle along the route (also helps avoid inconveniently having one run out of fuel halfway and cause everything behind to be blocked up) and leave the battery with plenty of charge for the local part of the journey.
The article does say "draft outline of an interim report" produced by a think-tank inside a government department. The government clearly likes the principle of the idea if they've announced it, but reading the article makes it clear that haven't got anywhere near the stage of deciding what form it'd take, only that they want to do something along these lines.
Normally with infrastructure projects, the next steps would be to invite civil engineering companies to produce plans of what might actually be feasible to construct, and they will do their concept art at that stage, and then the government will select from those ideas what they want to pursue, and then put that out to tender to different companies.
Of course, the project may be cancelled way before then when they realise it's probably too expensive.
I found the official Ministry documents page in Japanese[0]. Looks like it's more like dedicated closed freeway system for fixed-programmed autonomous semi trucks, than actual 500km-long belt. Whether it's going to be rubber tired or metal wheeled is at least officially left TBD for now.
Funny detail: Asahi Beer is asking in a slightly roundabout way to make it able to handle heavy objects and beverage-specific pallets, with a picture of a metal beer tank for illustration. They haven't decided if it's ever built or where depots will be - but it must carry beer IF they're going to do it!
Even a dedicated rail link or even a whole network would be much, much cheaper than a conveyor, which are also notoriously unreliable and would halt the entire system on every fault.
From the concept pics they have up it looks more like each container is a self contained 'train'. They say it is for zero emissions but it takes energy to move cargo. 'conveyor' belts do not have free energy. You have to move the belt and the cargo.
Interesting idea though. I hope they come up with some cool ideas.
It probably will be in reality - pallet conveyor is too slow and expensive, so it’s most likely that this would be an electric monorail system or similar.
(I work in logistics automation design, 310 miles of traditional pallet chain conveyor just isn’t feasible imo for loads of reasons)
Yeah I was going to write UDP first but then thought it might be a worse analogy because of that.
So what I was trying to say is: Why can't shipping containers be more "automatically" routed over rail? Perhaps fully automatic rail car couplers would be more helpful in general than yet another gadgetbahn?
Everyone is missing the point. It's not the form of the conveyor that matters it's the loading and unloading system. You need a set of standardised parcel sized containers first. Then you can design robotic handling equipment that can load and unload them easily. You can take the containers and feed them into your postal system and gradually automate more parts of the system reliably once you have standard reusable containers, bonus points if the containers are collapsible like some crates you get for fresh produce. You can imagine them clicking magnetically into totems on the street where they could be collected robotically more easily. Or in high traffic locations you might feed them hole in the wall that takes them into an underground system of some kind that transports them to a rail or truck depot. You can also imagine that parcels services might be reintroduced on local trains because you don't need an extra person to load and unload the containers at stations if this can be done robotically. There are endless possibilities for varying degrees of automation, but the key thing is that there has to be a standard interface for picking up a container of a known size. The parcel is the interface; the physical specifications of the standard containers are analogous to an API.
The technology already exists for this in airports[0][1]; when you check in a bag in a big modern airport after the gate agent sticks the sticker on the handle it won't be touched again by a human until it gets chucked into the aircraft hold. Your bag goes through the curtain and it is dropped into a standard bucket which is conveyed around under the concourse on a rollercoaster like automated rail system to screening then either to an automated vehicle for transfer between terminal buildings or to an automated storage system for people who have checked in too early or have a long transfer, finally to the stand/ramp for loading into the aircraft. Big international airports like Amsterdam Schipol, Paris Charles de Gaul, Madrid Barrajas and Heathrow all have systems like this.
Oh yeah, what could go wrong in such mega-project.......
In IT we learnt that mainframes was gem of tech but it's better to build many cheap desktops in cluster... In the aerospace mega-planes are mostly relic of the past because yes their single fly is cheaper but all the rest is much more expensive then using far less big planes. In the naval sector large oil tankers are essentially a relic of the past for similar + environmental reasons. Semi-abandoned office towers and some construction engineers state the same for big buildings https://www.israel21c.org/skyscrapers-are-huge-mistakes-warn... curiously for certain big things, built by the private sector but paid by the public, the private involved disagree...
Anyone who has ever stepped on a Shinkansen can understand that Japan has a way of getting shit done. It may start a bit later than other countries, but when they finally decide to execute (and this is still in planning stages so it might not), it happens surprisingly quickly.
I've watched them totally revamp Shibuya station over the past 10 years in ways that make it utterly unrecognisable to someone who hasn't been here since then, all while never taking down-time. There is another article on the HN front page titled "Why it takes NYC nearly 10 years to install 500 feet of pipes" right now... that's perhaps coloring people's expectations of the possible.