This is nuts.
Buckle Up
It isn’t enough that Japan already has its iconic bullet train that’s the envy of the world. No: it must now construct an entire “conveyor belt road” to embarrass us all.
Also referred to as an “autoflow road,” the automated cargo transport corridor will span some 320 miles, linking Tokyo and Osaka in a bid to make up for the country’s dire shortage in delivery capacity.
Calling it a “conveyor belt,” however, is a tad misleading. It’s not a blown-up moving walkway, and there’s no conveyor mechanism. Instead, the road will facilitate the movement of an army of robotic pallets that can travel from destination and destination around the clock, carrying loads of cargo.
“We need to be innovative with the way we approach roads,” Yuri Endo, a senior deputy director at Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism who is overseeing the project, told The Associated Press. “The key concept of the autoflow road is to create dedicated spaces within the road network for logistics, utilizing a 24-hour automated and unmanned transportation system.”
Hive Mind
An official concept video shows dozens of the cargo pallets traveling across the autoflow road, which is split into three lanes and sits between an existing highway.
The middle lane appears to act as a passing lane but also as a place for pallets to stop, while the two outermost ones are designated for opposite flows of traffic. The driverless vehicles automatically move between lanes and form convoys on the fly, with the kind of robotic coordination that would be impossible for human drivers (but which also has us asking, “why not just use a train?”)
Once they reach their destination, which is a logistics base of some sort, automatic forklifts will load and unload the cargo. From there, humans will handle making door-to-door deliveries.
The transport ministry claims that this automated network could do the work of 25,000 truck drivers per day.
Delivering the Goods
It wouldn’t be remiss to view the “conveyor belt road” as a somewhat over-elaborate solution. But there’s no denying that Japan is in the throes of a legitimate trucking crisis.
Over ninety percent of the country’s cargo is transported over roads. Recent restrictions on overtime hours, however, means that there will be a 14 percent deficit in delivery capacity, according to government estimates.
These same estimates indicated that a third of Japan’s cargo could be left undelivered by the end of the decade, per The New York Times, causing $70 billion in economic losses in 2030 alone. Since it’s unglamorous and often grueling work, it’s unlikely that companies can make up for the shortfall by hiring more drivers.
As such, Japan is investing serious money into the project, with one estimate sitting at over $24 billion, per The Guardian, citing Japanese newpaper Yomiuri Shimbun. Tests won’t begin until 2027 or 2028, though, with a fully operational auto-road not expected to be completed by the mid 2030s.
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