Denver International Airport tried to replace human baggage handlers with a fully automated system in the early 1990s — four thousand robotic carts racing across seventeen miles of underground track. It never worked the way it was designed to.
Photo-eye sensors couldn’t detect bag pileups, and carts fell out of sync with the conveyor belts, wedging suitcases underneath and tearing them apart. The chaos delayed the airport’s opening by sixteen months and burned through nearly $360 million before Denver finally shut the system down for good in 2005. The tunnels sat empty for twenty years — until 2026, when Denver announced a plan to turn them into pedestrian walkways connecting the terminals.
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It was another money grab for the politicians
That's Denver doing what Denver does. They have a huge shovel they use to dump money into the black hole, and the average taxpayer gets to foot the bill.
One of the most Denver fuckups ever!
$700,000,000 ???
That is definitely a dimocrat ran project.
Nice cover story
Fact. You learn more from your Failures than your Successes if you are a mind to.
Interesting project. I thought the due diligence done before the project roll out. May be someone has already made bilion of consultant fee just for testing the idea.
LMAO
And it is now why everyone wants to carry on their own luggage.
Denver Airport looks like something the Soviet Union would build
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
What gets me is that the tunnels never stopped being useful — they just switched jobs. For twenty years they sat there holding nothing but the rusted rails of a system nobody could fix, and now the same concrete is about to carry people instead of robots.
Denver spent decades patching a system that never worked before finally admitting defeat in 2005. If you were running the airport back in 1994, would you have kept trying to fix the robots or pulled the plug immediately?