In Germany, we used to have many post offices conveniently located in all the busy and not-so-busy parts of town; these were the place where you could send letters, do some banking (you could use cash to make a payment without having to own an account) and also get your letters (when you had a PO box). The post offices were also the place where letters and sometimes parcels received their final stage of sorting and were expedited by the mail carriers to the recipients. Many long-distance letters were transported by train in an arrangement between the postal service and the federal railways (Bundesbahn), both among the largest single nationalized employers and backbones of the economy; the arrangement was affectionately known as the elephants' marriage (Elefantenhochzeit)[2]; more officially, the system was dubbed Bahnpost. 8 cities had pneumatic tube delivery (Rohrpost); in Westberlin, the system was shut down in 1963 after a hundred years of successful operation. All cities had extensive street car systems (in addition to trolley buses, underground and elevated lines, as the case may be); in some cases, letters could also be thrown into a letterbox accessible from the outside of trams from which those letters would be collected or disseminated at appropriate junctures.

But all of this is boring, inefficient, and not digital. So today gazillions of post offices are closed down; in a good number of cases, whatever is left over is run inside of mostly smallish, privately-owned shops, but normally minus the banking. The business of sorting and carrying letters got re-located to huge boxes in the outskirts where trucks arrive from other places and trucks leave for the inner city.

Meanwhile, Deutsche Bahn got privatized (on paper) and had a number of top-notch managers over the decades, some from the automotive industry, that saw to it the thousands and thousands of kilometers of tracks got decomissioned and stations even on active lines closed down, or at least de-manned. Ticket prices started skyrocketing. A lift on a decades-old ban on overland bus services was instituted, further deteriorating riderships.

For fifty years I get repeatedly told by politicians that train services have to be improved, and that rail freight has to be strengthened; yet since especially 1990, all central rail freight yards have closed down in all major cities.

In 1997, after 150 years of operation, the Bahnpost was unceremoniously terminated. All letters are transported in trucks and in planes now. Ah yes and there was a huge scandal concerning a lot of money around the boss of the postal service around that time, and lots of union activities because of a massive degradation of working conditions and pays.

So please leave me alone with all your fancy drones and hyperloops. We had all that and more. Much of it was built twice, once for forever and then a second time after WWII. When the cold war had officially ended, they sold off all of that invaluable infrastructure for scrap.

[1] "Innerstädtische Rohrpostnetze in Deutschland gab es in Berlin, Chemnitz, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Leipzig, München und Köln"—https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohrpost#Deutschland

[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnpost_(Deutschland)