

Bruges Will Cut Traffic with an Underground Beer Pipeline - prostoalex
http://www.wired.com/2014/09/underground-beer-pipeline/

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ThePhysicist
Niels Bohr would have approved of this. After all, he lived in a house which
was linked to the Carlsberg brewery across town by his own private beer
pipeline as well. The house -and lifetime supply of beer- was offered to him
by the brewery after he won the Nobel prize in Physics:
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/11/28/for-
winning...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/11/28/for-winning-the-
nobel-prize-niels-bohr-got-a-house-with-free-beer/)

~~~
walterbell
Excerpts of two comments on that article:

 _" In the past, there were two big Breweries in Copenhagen. Carlsberg and
Tuborg. Carlsberg supported the sciences and Tuborg supported the arts. So, if
you were a well known scientist, Carlsberg gave you free beer and if you were
a well known artist, Tuborg gave you free beer."_

\---

" _The house that Niels Bohr lived in was called the Carlsberg Honor Residence
(Carlsbergs Æresbolig), and was the home of people deemed worthy from 1914 to
1995, of which Niels Bohr was the most well known (he lived there 1932 to
1965).

Before Bohr it was the home of Danish philosopher Harald Høffding (he lived
there 1914-1931), and after Bohr it was the home of the archaeologist Johannes
Brøndsted (1963-1965), astronomer Bengt Strømgren (1967-1986), and professor
in East-Asian languags Søren Egerod (1988-1995). Egerod was the last person to
live there, and it is now the Carlsberg Academy."_

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hackuser
I've wondered: Instead of drone delivery, why not use underground conveyer
belts for delivery in communities with sufficient population density. Instead
of delivery trucks burning carbon and adding traffic, and people carrying
packages to and from them, deliveries could be loaded onto the conveyer system
and routed to their destinations.

Imagine Manhattan with no more delivery trucks and all the deliveries, every
day, for office buildings and apartment buildings being conveyed directly to
their basements (and maybe even to an elevator, which dumps the packages on
the appropriate floor).

The deliveries could be the mail and packages we are accustomed to now, but
also anything else from one building to another intra-city, b2b, b2c, or c2c:
Carryout meals (or a meal you made for your friend), groceries and drugs
(especially good for people too ill to go out), a computer to be repaired, the
ISP could send a replacement router, the papers you need from the office, a
substitute for intra-city mail, boxes to UPS/Fedex/etc -- anything could be
delivered within hours (though I might be overestimating how efficiently a
network with so many nodes could route).

Perhaps it would be too costly, but building a conveyer belt under someplace
as dense as Manhattan seems potentially cost-effective for all the benefits.
And again, perhaps I'm underestimating the complexity of a network with that
many nodes.

I realize this is a bit of blue sky thinking, and I know nothing of such
technology. And I'm pretending that there are no political issues.

~~~
saosebastiao
Conveyors are not scalable: they have terrible efficiency, maintenance, and
capital costs. Conveyors are actually fantastically energy inefficient...worse
than diesel trucks over anything longer than football field distances. Their
rolling friction grows linearly with length. Furthermore, their number of
moving parts grows linearly with length. And every roller added to the system
has the potential to shut down the entire system...all it takes is a seized
bearing. Routing efficiency is actually its strong point, which is why they
are used in so many factory and logistics operations, but those are typically
much smaller than manhattan.

That being said, there is definitely potential for underground logistics...but
it is more likely to happen on rails or in tubes with vehicle propulsion
instead of track propulsion.

~~~
sdk16420
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway)

They shut it down in 2003...

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jamesaguilar
I am curious how they will clean the pipeline between beers. You don't want to
contaminate one beer with another, and obviously it will be important to keep
it free of pathogens as well. This is really cool though.

~~~
foobarian
I heard an interview with someone from the brewery on NPR. Apparently the
"pipeline" is not a single pipe, but a bundle of multiple pipes, which carry
additional types of liquids such as dirty water, cleaning solution, etc. to
flush the actual beer-carrying pipe. Interesting setup.

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toomuchtodo
Can projects like this be funded by carbon credit/tax offsets? The article
mentions that road traffic from this pipeline will be reduced by 85%.

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w1ntermute
This reminds me of the 99% Invisible episode on Cow Tunnels[0].

0: [http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/cow-
tunnels/](http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/cow-tunnels/)

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jtrtoo
When will we get BTTH? It's always about the last mile...

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beloch
I can't wait until the anti-Keystone folks start in on this one. Just imagine
the horror that an underground beer-spill in beautiful Bruges could unleash!

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trhway
Those Germans! On some big navy ships before WWII they had ship wide beer
piping and taps similar to water piping and taps.

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phaer
Bruges is a City in Flanders, Belgium. It's not in Germany.

~~~
ulfw
Reminds me of Belgian Fries being called 'French Fries' in America...

~~~
_delirium
It's not agreed whether they originated in France or Belgium: both countries
claim to be the origin.

~~~
wwosik
That's why we call them Freedom Fries
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_fries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_fries))

