Replace major roads with 80mph conveyor belts
Posted by Alone-Breakfast3176@reddit | CrazyIdeas | View on Reddit | 37 comments
Major roads that have steady traffic 24/7 should just be torn up and replaced with industrial quality conveyor belts. You wouldn't even need a vehicle to travel on them.
unurbane@reddit
Conveyor belts all over the world require onsite maintenance teams to fix and reposition frequently, major maintenance often.
acakaacaka@reddit
Bro that's called a bus/tram/train
Why are we keep reinventing a worse version of train.
Sorry-Climate-7982@reddit
Entrance and exit methodology for pedestrians is left as an exercise for the student.
Signal_Tomorrow_2138@reddit
Gondola style. They won't be 80 mph but they move people.
EVRider81@reddit
Heinlein had rolling pedestrian roads in "The roads must roll"..they run in parallel,a slow one to step on/off, the next one a step up in speed,the next another step up until you get to a highway speed level that'll get you rapidly towards your destination. getting off reverses the process.
AnotherGeek42@reddit
Anne McCaffrey in the Doona series has similar conveyors on 2 worlds, with similar strategies. The maintenance was not a plot point.
No_Pepper_2512@reddit
Ahhh, Doona. I absolutely loved that book, and must have read it over 10 times. Now I have to go find a copy and read it again.
Gyrgir@reddit
Asimov used a similar setup for an urban commuter transit system in The Caves off Steel. This was written over a decade after The Roads Must Roll, and the two authors knew each other and wrote for some of the same magazines, so it seems likely Asimov borrowed the idea from Heinlein.
shaggs31@reddit
I was going to say this. I remember it seemed like a really crazy setup as there were several "lanes" of conveyor's each going at a different speed so you can get on and off easily.
MaleficentPapaya4768@reddit
All good until the rollerjacks go on strike!
machspec@reddit
Hyper loopy
ParentPostLacksWang@reddit
We’d have to bed the conveyor belts on some sort of solidly-set railing system, and have a way to take sections of the conveyor belt down for maintenance. I’d suggest instead of a flexible conveyor belt, we built flat segments which move and then move back on a separate rail so we can have bidirectional movement with only one set of segments. Sort of like an airport conveyor rather than a belt one. That means instead of a flexible surface where we need twice the length to cover one direction, we only need enough segments to cover each way.
Now since we have a segmented conveyor on rails, why don’t we just bunch up the traffic a tiny bit so we can run it in small batches and save even more on the segments. If we’re prepared to make them wait a few minutes for saving money and efficiency, we can just hook the segments up to one another, and that way we can pull them with motors attached to the front segment, that way it’s even easier to take them in and out of service for maintenance.
And oops, we just invented cargo railways.
OkRickySpinach@reddit
If it's a steady stream of traffic you could put magnets at the back of every car so nobody would need to use gas
MaleficentPapaya4768@reddit
Watch out, we're going to invent trains again!
Rgreen1202@reddit
Yeah....good for all the cars in the back not using gas but what about the car in front towing 300 cars behind it?
HeftyLove9389@reddit
I don't know. Maybe we can just make the first car a bit bigger, and put a massive engine in it. It's still a bit inefficient, so to help the engine, we can replace the high friction rubber tires with some steel on steel action.
174wrestler@reddit
They figured this out on trains, called distributed power. You have locomotives in the front, middle, and rear and they share the load.
TedW@reddit
Fun fact: the middle locomotive is called a "Power Bottom."
RespectableLurker555@reddit
ಠ ͜ʖ ಠ
Puzzled-Guess-2845@reddit
The magnets have both pulling and pushing power. North and south poles. So the front one is being pushed by 300 cars.
the_glutton17@reddit
So... trains?
Wonderful_Site5333@reddit
The Roads Must Roll-Robert Heinlein,1940.
NobilisReed@reddit
Came here to say this.
Budsygus@reddit
We can't even keep the people movers in airports running very well, and those move at like 5mph.
cleanforever@reddit
How do you take an exit without causing problems?
174wrestler@reddit
It's the same as an airplane landing. The wheels skid for a sec, get up to speed, then you brake.
not_so_wierd@reddit
Everyone gets one of those gigant inflated air balls that they use to roll people down hills.
When you see your exit - just jump off and roll that last few 100 yards to your front door.
GarageIndependent114@reddit
So, the Channel Tunnel?
Pit-Viper-13@reddit
As someone who deals with industrial conveyor belts daily, this is a bad idea. They aren’t maintenance free, and need periodic inspections, adjustments, and they do fail.
Instead of blocking off traffic to a small section of road that needs repaired, you would have to completely shut down the entire road.
PrisonerV@reddit
Elon Musk in here taking notes. Yes! Genius!
livens@reddit
Someone cuts your Conveyor Car off and you swerve to avoid them, overcorrect and you go sideways and start rolling. And rolling and rolling and rolling.
Diarrhea_Sandwich@reddit
Factorio player by any chance?
doesnotexist2@reddit
Great idea…..until you get to your destination and realize you’re in a 4,000lb object with a bunch of other 4,000lb objects going 80mph and you’ll get off of it and instantly stop moving.
Skirra08@reddit
We Americans will invent everything possible to avoid using trains, including about a billion ideas that are trains by any other name.
asdrunkasdrunkcanbe@reddit
No piss taking, it's with crazy ideas that you can start to develop actual ideas.
So obviously a conveyer belt system can't work. Between wear and tear, corners, difficult entering and exiting, it's not possible.
But, what could be possible in the same vein? Magentism. It's not infeasible to run a loop along under the asphalt which is electrified (and thefore magnetised) and interacts with a similar magnet underneath the car. The loop then uses pulses of electricity to propel each vehicle forward like a rail gun.
What else would this require? It would definitely require some kind of standard interface which allows the loop to fully take control of your vehicle, so you cannot manually steer or brake, or anything while on the track.
It would also require a slip-road system, where you drive into it, then the magnet takes over, accelerates your vehicle and manages merging, etc, into the new road.
Obviously it wouldn't be possible to mix ordinary vehicles and magentised vehicles, so you need to build new roads that do this.
And now we get to the point, that all, "How do we reduce traffic congestion and speed up transport" ideas get to - You eventually just reinvent trains or busses. Trains move lots and lots of people, at high speed, along fixed tracks.
So any such system, is just a kind of train. Except worse, because it's far less efficient in terms of space and energy, and it's far more expensive.
LightDeathguy@reddit
Well done you've just invented trains
giantpicklepi@reddit
I, Robot by Asimov has belts to transport pedestrians at high speed.