[heckanoobs]

The land is probably more valuable than the building configuration. It's a little different from the pipe example in that way. You can't easily tear up the pipes and do something else with the pipeway, but you could demolish a mall and build an entire live/work district.

[dredmorbius]

Pipelines offer uninterrupted right-of-way continuity from point to point. Shopping malls are distinctly noncontinuous, and better resemble ports (which is what they are).

That's the tricky bit in physically-routed infrastructure: pipelines, canals, rail, expressways, media (vs. transmission-based) comms links. None of them abide well with airgapping.

The comms-transport link goes back at least to the rail era when telegraph lines sprang up along them. You might have heard of one such venture: the Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunications, better known as SPRINT.

https://www.npr.org/2012/10/15/162963607/sprint-born-from-ra...

A delivery-based fulfillment service, say, Amazon, might have interest in some (though hardly all) of these as local distribution hubs.

[Tiktaalik]

Yeah the land is valuable. The building (and sea of parking) on it is built using last century thinking.

Rezone and densify, and build a mixed use walkable community of residential commercial and office.

[AnimalMuppet]

Some comment here on HN a month or so ago clarified this for me. It's more efficient to have a delivery truck go around to ten different houses than it is to have each of ten different vehicles drive from their houses to a central location.

Now if only there were some way to do that with people, not just with stuff (cough mumble public transit cough).

[seanp2k2]

“But I don’t want inner-city crime coming to MY neighborhood!” See also: why BART doesn’t go down the peninsula to San Jose like it was supposed to. Original BART system plan: https://io9.gizmodo.com/5866928/a-map-of-san-franciscos-subw...