Social Innovation
Forum
Delivering the Goods
by Ronald Adams and Terry Brewer
SUMMARY: Telecommuting keeps people off
the streets, but downtowns are still clogged with delivery trucks. A better idea is to use
abandoned rail spurs to move goods efficiently and cleanly on maglev robotic pallets,
untying urban gridlock in the process.
LECTRONIC GOODS MOVEMENT—DEEP IN MEAT CITY
Now, for the first time since Edison wired New York City, Gothamites have the chance to
update an urban infrastructure in place since Edison's time. If New Yorkers want effective
goods delivery in the Apple, fewer trucks, and a return of breathing space, we must cut
the Gordian knot of urban traffic. How? With the sharp blade of digitization, robotics,
and city smarts.
More parking tickets and "don’t block
the box" admonitions from City Hall, are an embarrassment to a city that a century
ago held enough imagination and brain-power to light its streets with the world’s
first electric power network.
Not to toss Digital Age babies out with
Industrial Age bathwater, we can, for example, make use of abandoned rail
spurs--"relics" of the Great Age of Railroads--to provide key elements in an
exciting digital innovation.
HIGH LINE—CASE IN POINT
Unused elevateds—like Manhattan’s antiquated West Side High Line (and even the
old Chicago and Baltimore undergrounds) can be exploited for off-grade robotic goods
movement within downtown areas of declining rail hub and port cities. Refurbished,
extended, and augmented with lightweight tensile threads, the old freight lines, bearing
mag-lev robotic pallets—and using available digital control technology--can move
goods and people in radical new ways.
Climbing away from the sprawling, Darth-Vaderish
Javits Center, the old New York Central "High Line"--tracks covered with weeds
since the 70's--still connects downtown to the meat market district and the West Village.
Its trestle trackage circles the old 30th Street freight rail-yard to where an unused spur
cuts through the Morgan General Mailing Facility. This neglected spur, and others further
downtown including 16th Street, can find new life.
We propose using the spurs to reach transfer
points—where conventional rail vehicles connect with robo-pallets in a system of
automated goods movement. These "robo-depots," would lie along the cultural
dividing line between gentrified old Chesea, and newly trendy "Chelsea West,"
neighborhoods that parallel the High Line.
Chelsea West, once industrial, now stylish and
cutting edge, with buildings spacious enough to attract even a Martha Stewart (easily
driving her truck inside the Starrett-Lehigh and up the elevator—why not—with 2
million square feet for tenants to play in) can also be the nexis of a 21st century
robotic goods movement system, hung high above what Walt Whitman called the "blab of
pave."
In the 1930's, freight moved through downtown
areas all over America—even the world—by freight car. Rails were laid in
cobblestone city streets. In the Depression, New York Central built an elevated
West Side freight line—with trackage going from 30th to Canal Streets, intended as a
"futuristic" goods movement mode—before trucks took over.
In a city of traffic congestion, an existing,
off-grade, right-of-way like the High Line and its spurs, should be regarded as pure gold.
Any existing ROW, a pathway through the city's heart, irreplaceable today, must be
preserved.
Unfortunately, the High Line traverses a swath of
the city, between Tenth and Twelfth Avenues, zoned as "industrial" but described
suddenly as "underdeveloped"—realtor lingo for: "let's put up a wall
of condos here." Of course, when an industrial area is residentialized, a piece of
the city's economic base is lost, usually forever.
But, here’s our chance to revive the
non-polluting (electric) transport of people—and goods—dreamed of in the heyday
of the High Line.
True, until recently—by night—along the
old High Line, prostitutes have been out in force providing curb service in the
aptly-named "meat market," giving realtors an excuse to declare the zone
"marginal" and thus a promising site for development.
But, those interested in a vital New York City
economy need not stand by helplessly, as the old rail freight yards—and even the rail
freight rights-of-way--both of enormous potential value to Manhattan—disappear into
the voracious maw of the city's real estate industry whose jobs end when their buildings
open.
The High Line facility must NOT be replaced by
60-storey residential, or even commercial towers—not when a 21st century digitized,
vibrant, goods-moving facility would be the "highest and best use" of the
right-of-way, and an important innovation for New York's future.
Re-opening the High Line can inaugurate a whole
new domain of authentically futuristic goods-movement in the heart of New York—and
launch an epoch of truck-free urban shipping including goods from the new E-tail kingdom.
Barring innovative developments, truck dominance
and urban traffic blight will continue. Although an E-commerce order is instantly
fulfilled by "anydot.com," the package must be delivered by truck—a relic
of the last Industrial Age—driven, in real time, by the same sort of non-bot fellow
who has driven wheeled carts for the last 5,000 years—except now he belongs to the
Teamsters Union, thuggish and retrogressive to the last belch of diesel exhaust.
Let's design our new robotic goods movement
system starting from the 30th Street railyard where the High Line emerges, all the way
inland, to the vital commercial areas west of Fifth Avenue.
The new High Line system can show the world how
authentic futurist thinking about "intractable" urban problems pushed noisy,
polluting, dangerous trucks out of the city’s core, replacing them with clean, silent
robotic goods delivery pallets.
New York's Manhattan Island with its high level
of demand for goods can showcase the actual means whereby commercial districts of old port
cities can reverse their fortunes and begin an urban industrial revival.
City governments should preserve technology
infrastructures for productive use, particularly those involving rights-of-way in
congested downtowns. But, let us also take the opportunity to resurrect the spirit of
invention that transformed our metropolis a century ago, to do it again.
About the Authors
Ronald Adams is a technology-assessment consultant for government and private industry. As
an automotive consultant, he wrote specifications for the New York City Taxi and Limousine
Commission. He has been a guest lecturer at Polyechnic Institute of New York, and his
writings have appeared in Mechanix Illustrated and Industrial Design.
Terry Brewer has worked as a manager for major
book publishers such as Grolier, Reinhold. Van Nostrand, Harper, John Wiley & Sons.
With Moseley Associates, she has written numerous management studies and business reports
for publishing clients.
They can be reached by e-mail: teron@nyc.rr.com.
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