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Japan Automated Cargo Transport
Japan is planning to build an automated cargo transport corridor between Tokyo and Osaka, dubbed a "conveyor belt road" by the government, to make up for a shortage of truck drivers.
"We need to be innovative with the way we approach roads," said Yuri Endo, a senior deputy director overseeing the effort at the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism.
I don't think this is quite the same as the rolling road idea from Robert Heinlein's 1940 story The Roads Must Roll, which describes a country-wide set of conveyor belts to move people and cargo.
An earlier version of this idea can be found in When the Sleeper Wakes, by H.G. Wells; he called it a moving roadway:
It was not a roadway at all, as Graham understood such things, for in the nineteenth century the only roads and streets were beaten tracks of motionless earth, jostling rivulets of vehicles between narrow footways. But this roadway was three hundred feet across, and it moved; it moved, all save the middle, the lowest part. For a moment, the motion dazzled his mind. Then he understood.Under the balcony this extraordinary roadway ran swiftly to Graham's right, an endless flow rushing along as fast as a nineteenth century express train, an endless platform of narrow transverse overlapping slats with little interspaces that permitted it to follow the curvatures of the street.
In Mechanocracy, by Miles J. Breuer, published by Amazing Stories in 1932, there is a very early description of an automatic truck.
Thanks to Winchell Chung (@nyrath) for pointing this article out.
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