[treis]

I'll never understand these sort of objections to convenience in favor of density. This is awesome and I can see it being a utility similar to water pipes or electricity going to a house for the same reason we all have mailboxes. Delivery is convenient and this could make it cheap and fast.

[keyboard_slap]

I'm not objecting to convince in favor of density because there isn't a choice to be made between the two. You can have convenience in low or high density development. The difference is in cost and complexity; high density development has all the convenience with fewer delivery costs

[conductr]

What's the cost of rebuilding our existing tangible cities for density? Is that without complexity? What about consideration for time?

It's not as easy as hitting "new game" on Sim City

[keyboard_slap]

On this small scale, rebuilding would likely be more expensive than this tunnel. But extending this network to every home would be (IMO) on the same order of magnitude as redevelopment in cost, complexity, and time. Redevelopment is complicated during construction but this system is also complicated forever. Our cities are already being rebuilt piece-by-piece every day; I'd just like zoning laws to permit rebuilding with mixed use and higher density development

[conductr]

It seems like it would always be small scale, just replicated. I don’t think they’re trying to long distance delivery through this. Like if wanted a pizza from 100 miles away, I’d not expect that to be supported.

I’m seeing it like a LAN. Which is how most of America is built. Clusters of businesses supported by surrounding area of residential. Any interconnection would likely benefit from batched movement into the node (cargo truck) then items go into this as a last mile solution.

[jjav]

> high density development has all the convenience with fewer delivery costs

This seems intuitively true, but is it true?

Is food delivery cheaper in Manhattan than in some sleep midwest suburb?

[keyboard_slap]

In some sleepy suburb you must pay for food delivery or hop in your car and drive to the restaurant. In Manhattan you could pay for delivery or skip delivery altogether and walk to one of the half-dozen (at least) restaurants on your block.