A $3.4 Billion Cargo Burrow for Automated Delivery Trucks

The Swiss came up a creative solution to handle the immense traffic volume expected in next 15 years

Building more roads to cope up with ever increasing traffic problems is not an advisable solution, especially when the traffic is directly related to transporting goods from one place to another by road. Switzerland is expecting a gigantic 45 per cent growth in traffic volume in next 15 years and most of it is related to goods transportation.

These delivery trucks play their role in air and sea cargo services offered by freighters in every part of the globe. It doesn’t matter whether it be delivering sea cargo to Pakistanor any other country in the world, these trucks cause some problems and offer some solutions at the same time.

The most obvious option is to build an expensive transit route like the railways but that doesn’t appeal too much to the Swiss. So what they came up with a more expensive and novel solution: a $3.4 billion underground cargo burrow full of automated delivery trucks. Cargo Sous Terrain last week has presented a feasibility study and its plan for underground cargo tunnel, in Zurich.
This idea includes digging a 6-metre wide, 66.7-kilometre long tunnel 50 metres below ground. It would connect Zurich with logistics centres out to the west, south of Bern. The pilot tunnel will be linked to the cargo transfer points through the four above-ground waystations. The expansion of dedicated cargo network to connect Zurich to Geneva is the ultimate goal of this project.

According to the plan the tunnel will be containing three lanes for inductively powered, autonomous electric delivery trucks. These trucks will be travelling a speed of 30 kilometres per hour, whereas a separate monorail system will be delivering smaller packages from one point to another at 60 km/h. solar panels mounted on the roofs of the transfer stations will be providing the power to run this underground parcel transferring system.

The best thing about this system is that it will help reduce the big transportation vehicle from the urban areas and smaller vans, scooters and delivery drones will be used to make door-to-door deliveries. It will also increase the frequency of the deliveries. This tunnel could be operational in 2030 if everything works as planned.