Slurry Tubes

Imagine trying to empty a bucket full of cherry pips into a pot.

Some pips will drop out of their own free will, while others will clump together and take a bit more encouragement, eventually blobbing out all at once in a nasty mess.

Similarly, public transport is kind of clumpy.

What we need is more fluidity.

Now imagine the same bucketful of pips, only now, fill it with enough water to put the pips into suspension.

Now you should be able to pour the pippy slurry into your pot with the greatest of ease. If you were of a more adventurous bent, you might even be able to create an elaborate system of pipes and tubes in order to transport your cherry-pip suspension to any of a number of locations. You might even be able to pressurise your delivery mechanism, thus increasing your overall bandwidth (and resulting in far more pips per second than using alternate methods)

Were you to cut the bottom off your delivery pot and replace it with a sieve-like device, you can even separate your pips from their transmission medium with the minimum of fuss.

Now imagine turning up at the local transit terminal, getting into an individual pod marked with your preferred location, closing the door and then feeling the sensation of being hoisted into a transit vat, among thousands of others.

You listen intently as the vat is flooded with the suspensive liquid (probably water, but no one knows), the whole thing gets pressurised, and then the floor opens up, and thousands of pods get sluiced through a particular A-to-B pipe, travelling at incredible speeds before ending up in another transit terminal at your preferred location hundreds of miles away.