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Comment by cronix | Hacker News Reader

One thing the drones really need to do before being deployed en masse (besides safety) is to become relatively silent. They are quite loud. I can hear a single one from about 1/2 mile away. I can't imagine what it will be like if many are flying all over, at all times. It will be like everybody is living next to an airport - something I consciously choose to not live close to due to noise pollution. Quality of life will go down, and people will become very annoyed. I own 2 drones. They are very loud and there isn't much you can do to quiet them. They are helicopters with 4x the number of blades on very tiny motors that spin very fast and are loud.

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Tangent: I don’t think I’ve ever been more incensed than when I learned Harley Davidsons are quiet out of the factory and people make them loud. And while I can get a ticket for something trivial, I’ve never heard of someone getting a ticket for riding a motorcycle or car that’s obnoxiously loud and can be heard a mile away. My point, I guess, cities, townships, what have you, don’t care about noise.

My point, I guess, cities, townships, what have you, don’t care about noise.

Cities, townships, what have you, will care about whatever their active constituents tell them to.

It took a few years, but a neighborhood organization managed to get a crackdown on motorcycle noise in Chicago. I don't know if it worked because I moved away before it went into effect. But there was a ton of press coverage for a very long time, so there's no way the offending riders could know that people don't like them.

Loud Motorcycles In Alderman's Crosshairs As LSD Noise Monitoring Starts: https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20170824/lincoln-park/loud-m...

> My point, I guess, cities, townships, what have you, don’t care about noise.

I think the poster was referring to active constituents.

But I think you are wrong. I don't know of anybody who wants a loud car or bike trekking by their house. But yet it still happens over and over.

It is unclear if enough "active constituents" are not complaining or they are ignored.

I don't but I know some people are delighted at the sound of some sport cars.

I don't but I know some people are delighted at the sound of some sport cars.

I don't disagree. But in context.

On track day at the local race track? Sure. At a professional sporting event? Great. Going down a residential street when people are trying to sleep? No way.

I live on a hill with a busy intersection at the bottom. I get to listen to trucks with jake brakes going down the hill and people accelerating out of the intersection. I don't exactly live somewhere high class so vehicles with rusted out exhausts and Civics with fart cans abound. It doesn't bother me one bit. You get used to it.

It's people in gated communities and quiet suburban neighborhoods where there is rarely much noise who complain about noise because the baseline amount of noise they experience is so low that every single loud noise is highly noticeable.

Unsure why you're being downvoted, but in my experience, this is absolutely correct.

When I lived on a busy intersection, the noise level was always there, it just became background.

When I lived near a flightpath, the sound of airlines was regularly there, and it also just became background.

I now live in a very quiet area, and every passing motorbike is a disturbance.

Then again, the other thing that's changed is my age and expectations of life. Whether or not that's related or not, I dunno.

I've had the opposite experience. I lived in downtown SF. The noise of a loud motorcycle going by is substantively different from the ordinary background noise of city life. Unlike every other noise, you can't e.g. talk while it's going by.

There is very good reason to treat it differently from the usual honks and airbrakes.

I am not advocating loud motorcycles but as a rider I know from experience that cars on the roads will pay more attention and give more caution to a louder motorcycle.

A simple fender bender on a motorcycle can be fatal which is the reasoning behind the phrase "Loud pipes save lives."

Are some people doing it to be obnoxious? Probably. Are some people doing it out of the desire for increased safety? Yes.

My car would be safer with a super-loud siren that blares continuously to announce my prescence, but I don't do it because I live in a society and I wouldn't like it if everyone else did that.

Harley’s are terrible motorcycles with severe safety compromising design flaws made for stylistic reasons — the argument that they should be made loud for real safety reasons employs deeply flawed reasoning.

I rode a (non Harley, well engineered) motorcycle for years and always thought the claim that you needed to make your bike loud to enhance perception was bollocks. The right answer is to always ride with the awareness that people can’t/don’t see you and plan lane position accordingly.

> severe safety compromising design flaws made for stylistic reason

Could you explain what exactly ?

People buy Harley’s for the twin cam engine which vibrates a lot and “if you have to ask why this is good then you wouldn’t understand”. The marketing for Harley’s is very much about buying into “worse is better” for “cool” factor — and for social signaling that you might know how to turn your own wrenches.

The joke is that Harley owners spend more time in the garage with their bikes than riding them. They require a lot of maintenance to keep running. From a risk perspective, the onerously frequent maintenance requirements increase the chance of a mechanic introduced error having negative safety outcomes. The fact that every owner basically “has” to work on the bikes rather extensively means that they are more likely in general to be worked on by not so qualified mechanics. The extensive customization culture surrounding the bikes also comes with a lot of really easy ways for safety compromising designs to be introduced via ill thought out customization.

These may seem like small factors but all of them represent much more real risks than the imagined safety benefit that might come by making your bike excessively loud. Someone telling you to ride a Harley and also telling you to make it loud for safety is not giving good safety advice — to maximize safe riding you should never try to lower the responsibility of the rider to be aware of other drivers not seeing them - you can’t make yourself more visible by being loud and shouldn’t encourage someone to think this will work and thereby encourage them to not proactively defend themselves from a driver who might not see them.

There are other safety relevant issues with the bike design — notoriously bad brakes and gearboxes, poor suspension, heavy with a low center of gravity that makes turning a relatively higher effort activity for shorter riders and generally makes recovery from problem scenarios more difficult, the “Harley wobble” (yes wobble can happen with other bikes but it tends to be more severe with Harley’s) ...

It’s probably also worth pointing out that there have been something like 4 large recalls in the last 5 years for clutch problems that can lead to sudden brake failure. Also, the twin cam engine design is inherently not long lasting with many failure modes which means breakdowns are common (engine failure/fluid leaks are not generally conducive to safety).

I fully agree that they're shitty bikes (for the money, everything is relative to cost obviously) but I'm not sure it matters when it comes to safety. Mechanical failure/vehicle performance is still basically a rounding error compared to humans being dumb when it comes to causes of crashes.

If you think more modern Harley's(twin cams, evolutions)are unreliable I guess you'd say the older ones didn't run at all. The fact something can vibrate and shake so much and leave the Stealership with rattling apart is a feat of engineering.

With cam tensioners changed you'll get 100k out of a twincam before needing work with just oil and tires(and whatever parts rattle off).

Harley's trying to innovate(electric bikes/scooters, dual sport). Problem is their consumer base is stuck in past/vanishing. Some people use fountain pens instead of more modern pens, even though they might be more inconvenient/expensive. While I only own Japanese bikes now, I can't deny there is a 'feeling' of riding a Harley.

Sibling comment has good points. My go-to was years back when HD put a single disc with a single piston caliper up front. Anything Japanese at that point put two discs, usually multiple pistons. Some sport bikes were running monster six piston calipers.

And there’s that fat-ass Harley hauling it’s bulk down with that one scrawny disc and anemic caliper. ‘cuz, you know, style. Always seemed like a lawsuit waiting to happen. Can you imagine a car manufacturer saying, “the braking system is not even close to state-of-the-art because it wouldn’t look good”?

You are making two false dichotomies.

Even if Harley's have other safety compromises, loud pipes can make them safer. Even if you ride with awareness, loud pipes can make you safer. There is generally a lack of hard evidence, but it only makes sense that they would to me.

It can simultaneously be true that loud pipes save lives and loud pipes annoy people; whether the tradeoff is worth it to you is the real question.

Loud pipes direct sound out and back, so anyone ahead of you, e.g. at an intersection or in oncoming traffic, still isn't going to hear you.

"Loud pipes save lives" has never been proven by any data. Decent article/rant about this saying: https://www.revzilla.com/common-tread/stop-saying-loud-pipes...

There is generally a lack of hard evidence, but it only makes sense that they would to me.

The lack of hard evidence should be your first clue, because you know the loud pipes crowd would crow to sunset if there were even the slightest shred of evidence. But it “makes sense”, does it? How many things did we think we knew because it “makes sense” until one day, “turns out...”?

So one must first establish that loud pipes save lives. And the onus is on the one making that claim.

By that logic, wearing a helmet is also "deeply flawed reasoning"

I don’t think this is true at all — helmets are very useful safety equipment when motorcycle riding. Protection from bugs and airborne rocks is very real — I had some rides where I had to pull over and clean my helmet visor to see through all the grasshopper guts I’d hit — flying objects will hit you and very likely cause an accident or at least a lot of discomfort if you have no face protection. Helmets are worth it on those points alone even if you discard the (very real, very substantiated) potential to turn fatal impacts into survivable impacts.

That said — wearing a helmet can cause one to take more risks out of a belief in greater survivability odds. On the track in full safety gear — the odds of crash survival really can be high enough to justify the extra risk taking mentality — loud pipes don’t boost survivability to anything remotely the same degree as helmets — in my opinion it’s very likely that someone who genuinely (and mistakenly) believes their loud pipes make them more perceivable will allow that belief to influence their actions and be very likely to drive less defensely.

On the general topic of helmets increasing risk taking — I actually do think this belief can lead to meaningful increase in chance of mistakes in other contexts. I’m an avid rock climber — a very small percentage of climbers always wear a helmet but most only wear one when doing climbs with significant amount of loose rock. The main safety use of a helmet when climbing is protection from falling rocks or other objects — there are some rare circumstances when a helmet could protect you when you fall but those are quite unusual — generally only happen when you get flipped upside which usually only happens when you mismanage the rope position. It’s _possible_ the helmet could help protect from a climbing fall but much better protection is to correctly manage rope position which is necessary, typically straightforward, and also something you are unlikely to do wrong when climbing at your level. If you put a helmet on and suddenly feel “able” to take more risks when climbing you are making a big mistake — the very marginal extra fall safety of the helmet is not worth increasing your risk taking at all — but it can often be hard to avoid increase to risk taking even when you are aware the increase is not justified. In my opinion, the helmet is not worth making this trade off (except in areas with lots of risk of rockfall or dropped gear from parties above).

which is the reasoning behind the phrase "Loud pipes save lives."

No, the reasoning is to come up with some plausible excuse to run open pipes. Safety, however, is a cloud of bullshit to distract you from the thirteen year old boy in leather making vroom-vroom noises.

You wanna “save lives”? Ride like you’re invisible. Because that “cars pay more attention to loud pipes” bullshit is going to get you killed with a false sense of security.

Signed, 35 years of riding on stock pipes, and haven’t collided with a car yet.

Loud pipes distract drivers in cars which makes them less safe on the road.

FWIW, California changed the minimum ticket for noise violations on vehicles to $1000 this year. They are apparently cracking down on it, as they have abolished the “fix it ticket” that used to allow the vehicle to be repaired and then the ticket is commuted. Now, the officer must fine you.

This is fantastic news!

I once had the exhaust pipe before my catalytic converter on my car fall out due to a bump and some rust that had been building up. My car suddenly became very very loud, louder than I had ever realized it could be. I was quite embarrassed while driving the car home, and soon got it fixed. It wasn't especially expensive to fix. If that happened in California I might get a $1000 ticket? Or is the large ticket only for intentionally loud and illegal exhausts.

I think in your specific case it would be up to the officer's discretion if you were pulled over for it. About 20 years ago I worked the night shift at a warehouse and my car's passenger side headlight went out on my way to work. I had time to stop at a parts dealer before they closed and picked up a new headlight, but I didn't have time to install it so I chucked it in the back seat and drove on to my job. I was pulled over right before pulling into work, and the trooper was reading me the riot act over the light. When I could get a word in I explained to him that it went out on me while driving, and I stopped to get one and planned to install it on my lunch break. I pointed to it in the back seat and showed him my receipt. He seemed pissed that his ranting was not necessary, but he didn't write me a ticket and instructed me to definitely install it that night because he'd be waiting for me on my trip home.

Perhaps I was lucky to get a cop who wasn't so much of an asshole that he'd write me a ticket despite seeing my best intentions to deal with a situation that could happen to anyone. Then again, I could have been pulled over by a guy who would have started off nice and thanked me for being conscientious enough to stop for the part that night.

>I think in your specific case it would be up to the officer's discretion if you were pulled over for it

So people that don't make a good impression get screwed out of a grand they probably don't have. Relying on the benevolence of police is not going to work out well for average people in the long run.

I know you don't have rust in CA but if they had a $1k fine where I live that would be just a massive slap in the face to poor people driving old cars (the exhaust rusts out and you don't know until it happens). I get that making cars more expensive is popular in certain places but unfortunately the reality is that a ton our infrastructure is based around them and the negative consequences of hidden costs like this are greater than then gain from forcing a few people to give up driving because they can't afford it.

I don't know why you're getting downvoted but I'll second this. I had the same thought when my home state decided to double-the-double damages for some tickets (e.g. speeding in construction zone). For many if not most individuals and families in my low-income state a $1,000 ticket could start a cascade of disasters that ends with them losing their transportation, job, and place of living. It's cruelty pure and simple. Especially since a lack of public transportation means you don't have a choice not to own a car, here.

Maybe people who can't afford a $1000 ticket for speeding in a construction zone shouldn't speed in a construction zone?

One of the reasons states increase fines regressively is because the targeted acts are committed most frequently by those at the lower end of the income spectrum, and existing fine amounts were insufficient to deter such activity.

So what happens if a headlight or turn signal goes out while you're in the middle of your drive? Do you immediately pull over and call a tow to avoid having a officer pull you over and slap you with a 1k ticket because your light bulb decided to go bad right then? What about if a rear break light goes out, only way to usually know about those ones is if someone alerts you to it.

I dont think he meant the fix it tickets for everything, just for purposely loud vehicles.

Don't automatically pay it. Go to court and ask the county clerk to speak to a judge to get the fine waived. Depending on your county, this may or may not work, but you should always do this first. In many cases, the clerk on behalf of the judge will waive it for you and require you to pay a small processing fee.

There is an electric BMW that has a loudspeaker in a fake exhaust pipe to make it sound like a petrol engine to people outside of the car.

I think the negative effects of noise pollution are underestimated. It's never properly taken into account when people plan things. Part of it is many people don't understand just how soul destroying it can be (yet).

> has a loudspeaker in a fake exhaust pipe to make it sound like a petrol engine

This is however exceptionally helpful for blind people navigating near a road.

I haven't seen the BMW in question so it might be unnecessarily loud, but electric cars are often so quiet you could barely hear one coming.

But should blind people rely on sound to cross in the first place? Many european cities are pushing for more cycling. Bicycles are pretty much totally silent and can go as fast as a car typically goes in a busy city.

I don't think it would ever be the chosen option and guide dogs, human assistance, etc. would all be preferable. But sometimes those just won't be available.

One of the more dangerous aspects is in areas where cars are reversing / manoeuvring at low speeds - e.g. car parks. I'm fully sighted and still occasionally have a near miss with an electric / hybrid that I haven't noticed reversing!

Bicycles do present some measure of danger, albeit reduced thanks to the lower momentum & crushing power.

Some material from the RNIB, a UK charity: https://www.rnib.org.uk/rnibconnect/silent-deadly-electric-h...

Are blind people stepping out in front of bicycles because they can't hear them?

It's like drawing a horse on an early petrol engine car...

Yeah, or giving a car a shiny fur coat and neatly trimmed mane.

Oh please, I have owned two new ones, the last in 2017. They are not exactly "quiet" as new but not nearly as loud as those who straight pipe. After market pipes certified for road use still must meet Federal law. Plus recently as for more current models the EPA slapped HD with fines and future penalties over the modification of the engine and exhaust which really has cut down on the noise because HD will void your warranty with the EPA blessing if you use unapproved modifications which includes exhaust. Plus Harley isn't unique in attracting drivers/riders who make their exhaust system obnoxiously loud and yes they annoy many of their fellow HD riders too - they get to ride in the back of the pack.

Plus if you are in California look up AB1824 which changed the loud exhaust regulations to assess a fine in every case. Used to be if you got pulled you could simply produce a receipt stating you fixed the loud exhaust and pay no fine but people were skirting that with obvious success. So yes, governments do care. Some HOA and Condo association ban all motorcycles because of noise.

Now with regards to drones, noisy little suckers. The other issue is a private citizen is heavily restricted where they can even fly them. State parks are off limits in most states, any place where people gather of course is out, you can even be blocked from flying them on your property by many HOA and Condo associations (mentioned them before for similar reasons).

Locally to me, Cobb County Georgia has an association for model aircraft that may support drones. They have their own field put in with tax dollars but "maintained" by user fees. Don't even think of using it until you pony up to two different organizations and an initiation fee and such. Yet places which are set aside for the legal use of drones may end up being this way unless the industry adapts.

My father's recent DJI purchase did not automatically include the propeller guards, seems there is good profit in selling replacement blades. It definitely is noisy and I would expect research into blade technology can remedy some of that, surely the military has already done so.

> My father's recent DJI purchase did not automatically include the propeller guards, seems there is good profit in selling replacement blades.

you don't necessarily want prop guards most of the time. they make the props less efficient, which decreases aerodynamic performance and battery life.

IMO, the Spark should come with them- DJI encourages users to launch and land directly on their hand.

that's a fair point. you shouldn't encourage your customers to do something like that without including the bits of plastic that make it safe.

that said, I got the combo bundle with rotor guards and I almost never use them because they make the drone so squirrelly in wind. I hand launch/land every time and I have yet to cut myself on the rotors. I was very happy to have them when I used the drone to check all my gutters for leaves, takes a lot of the stress out of flying so close to the roof.

Oh you can get a fine in Europe for a loud vehicle. It can even be seized by the cops.

As far as laws dealing with vehicle noise pollution, it greatly depends on where you live. I'm in a relatively rural town that is considered part of the Metro Atlanta area, and we have a lot of strange laws as a result. For example, there is a local noise ordinance that allows police to ticket a driver for a noisy muffler on a car or truck any time of day or night, but motorcycles (which are often much louder around here) are exempt. The reason, of course, is that a few of the council members are also bikers, so they are putting their own interests above those of the community. There's been a proposal at town hall meetings to change the law to include any motorized vehicle, but it always gets tabled.

A reason motorcycles are loud (or made to be loud) is safety: when driving on highways or in busy areas, the idea is the noise makes the rider safer by offsetting their size disadvantage.

I don't think the guys doing wheelies down the street in front of my house are particularly concerned about safety. I think they're more interested in showing off.

>I don’t think I’ve ever been more incensed than when I learned Harley Davidsons are quiet out of the factory and people make them loud. And while I can get a ticket for something trivial, I’ve never heard of someone getting a ticket for riding a motorcycle or car that’s obnoxiously loud and can be heard a mile away

They're not exactly quiet from the factory but people make them loud because thanks to the Doppler effect you need to be really loud for someone in a vehicle beside you to hear you (and they're unlikely to consciously see you if they want to move over because their brain isn't used to checking for objects that are motorcycle sized).

Or light pollution.

I don't see this happening. The propeller physics aren't changing. If you are using the quadrotor architechure, directly lifting your playload with no wings, there's a sound-per-kg number that can't be engineered away.

Is Active noise canceling an option?

On the ground? To an extent, but it would be expensive to deploy and maintain. On the drone? No, you’re adding weight and reducing available power.

I thought iancmceachern asked a really good question. I was curious if it could work even theoretically.

I read the Wikipedia article on Active Noise Control. The third paragraph under Explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_noise_control#Explanati... mentions that if it's at the source, it needs to be just as loud as the source (as opposed to being by the ear, in which case even a whisper might be enough).

In addition to being as loud as the source, you need to blast it in all directions. So I guess it's hard/impossible to perfectly hit the same sound waves in all directions. If you ever miss, you'll just be doubling the noise.

Maybe that's why you'll be hard-pressed to find anything in a fixed installation that uses active noise cancellation at the source - even if it's heavy, periodic, and uses a lot of power anyway - such as a home air conditioner. Noise cancellation close to the ear seems much easier for this reason, and maybe at the source it's just impossible.

Not impossible, just impractical unless silence is incredibly important. If you want a quiet helicopter then you do what you can to reduce the noise signiture, then you might consider destructive interference. You wouldn’t use speakers, but that’s not the only way to produce a noise. In fact a clever country might even figure out how to use an arrangement of blades and fans designed to produce noise in such a way that it tends to cancel out the loudest contributions to the signature.

Buuuut... that’s not really viable for anything civilian or even commercial.

Like the Stealth Black Hawk helicopters that were used in the Osama Bin Laden raid!

(There existence is still not officially acknowledged of course, but many pictures exist.)

I was very curious about the technology they used to reduce the noise, as black hawks are very loud.

I believe I read that fan noise is chaotic, and hence impossible to cancel. Don't quote me on that, though.

This right here sounds like overengineering.

Active noise canceling is equivalent to beam shaping. It can work in headphones because you can aim the minima at the ear and the maxima away from it, but the best you could achieve by adding speakers to a drone would be selecting where the energy hits. Directing everything to the upper hemisphere would be nice, but that's not how beam shaping works.

Elon Musk had a similar argument against, I think, flying cars on Joe Rogans show. I guess it is one of those things were imagination is greater than reality. Like a lot of space stuff (mostly in regards to distance).

Though I guess high and light applications would disturbe less.

What makes a propellor different from a wing in this respect? Is it just because you have several of them next to each other and interfering with each other?

Both propellers and wings are fundamentally the same thing: airfoils.

However, air passes over a propeller much, much faster than over a wing, and creates shock waves in a way that wings don't.

Does it? The same airfoil needs the same speed to provide a given amount of lift, regardless of whether it’s a wing or a propellor.

The speed of a propeller is low close to the rotor, and sometimes faster than sound at the extremity of the blades. Can’t reduce sound on that.

Propeller efficiency takes a nose dive when the tips go supersonic. Most props therefore do not operate in this range.

Wings don't rotate and thus don't efficiently produce sound waves.

It’s a combination of factors, one of which is that a prop is just out there, unshielded like the fans inside a jet engine (which still make a ton of noise in the case I’d high bypass models). Then there’s cortex shedding, which is mostly occurring along edges and tips. Airplanes also tend to fly at much higher altitudes except on takeoff and landing, or their noise would be an issue too. Finally you’re right that the number and arrangement of blades matters, because each blade produces some turbulence, vortices, etc which then interact with the next blade in sequence. All told the issue is just s high degree of aerodynamic noise. You get that with a wing and any aerodynamic body, and really if you’ve ever seen model jets fly you’ve heard the racket they make.

The major issue is that until drones came around, you didn’t have to worry very often about large number of high performance aircraft operating throughout civilian airspace, at very low altitudes in crowded areas.

A plain wing is way less noisy, though. Construct a glider with the same mass as a typical quadcopter and you’ll be hard pressed to hear any noise from it, despite the fact that the wing is unshielded and has edges to shed vortexes from.

Oh sure, but the glider is moving through the air at a stately pace (generally between 50-95mph), shedding vortices without anything coming behind them to crash into them. A prop operates at much higher speeds, typically between 450-720mph!

Really? I arbitrarily looked up the DJI Phantom 3 and found a max RPM of about 8000 with a prop diameter of 9 inches, which gives a tip speed of about 200 MPH at the most.

That’s still pretty fast, of course. That points to using bigger props as a potential way to cut noise.

You’re right, I was looking at max motor rpm, whoops!

A lot of things: the high rpm motor powering it, the combined area of the blade edge that is higher than the area of the wing edge, and the higher pressure differential between the air behind the propeller compared to the air in front of it. The sound results from this pressure differential collapsing so anything that increases the pressure differential will create more sound.

This doesn't really need another law. If something can be heard X m/ft away after night-time N (i.e., car stereo bass blasting at 3 am), or louder than Y anytime (i.e., concert without a permit), then it's creating a nuisance under existing legislation. It needs enforcement of what's already on the books if there's a complaint.

And the permit requirement to operate a small R/C toy is ridiculous: this information you don't want the government to have because it will be misused similarly to how social media was abused in the Gatwick Airport (non-)incident. The sensible thing would be classes (Class 1, 2, 3, etc.) of unmanned flying devices, as with model rockets.

https://www.nar.org/find-a-local-club/section-guidebook/laws...

  It needs enforcement of what's already on
  the books if there's a complaint.

Do the cops in your area respond to a noise complaint in less than the ~15 minutes it takes for a drone battery to run out?

Yes! My biggest single complaint about drones is the noise. I also own and fly a drone (for professional photography and video work) but I am LOATHE to fly that thing when anyone else is around. It’s just so dang annoying.

As a drone owner, it drives me bananas when I see people just flying them all over the place with no account for how irritating the noise is.

If drones could be made substantially quieter, everyone’s quality of life would go up and we could be saved from inconsiderate people with no regard for others.

I honestly wish all drone owners were as considerate as you sound.

Unfortunately, anecdotally I'd have to say that the majority are not considerate.

Yeah that’s the dream alright. So many of them are so incredibly inconsiderate that it gives the rest of us a bad name.

I’m legitimately too embarrassed to fly it around anyone because of how incredibly inconsiderate your average hobbyist is. Even though I actually have a reason to fly it (I get paid).

Maybe if they fly them high enough? Or maybe wind would become a problem.

Also, dedicated drone corridors that are over roads or uninhabited areas, so at least only cars would be hit in case one of them drops out of the sky.

The solution is fixed wing "drones". The props on a fixed wing RC 'drone' are still loud, but for an equivalent mass in the air they are a LOT quieter than quads. They're also more efficient, you get more flight time with fixed wings.

There are just three problems:

1) Landing space (not a hard problem to solve with durable designs that have very low stall speeds.)

2) For some photography purposes, hovering is the only way to get the shot.

3) They're just not as sexy. People like quads because they seem a lot more sci-fi.

  helicopters with 4x the number of blades

I mean, what’s the difference between a helicopter with four blades, versus the same helicopter by with only one blade, but four times the size?

Except a full scale helicopter blade is easily 100 times larger.

So they are helicopters, but 100 times smaller, but with four blades.

When I flew a Phantom 4 to 150 feet, it was basically invisible and totally silent. I’m guessing you’re thinking of much larger drones?

I guess army drones are silent.

Army drones are usually fixed-wing - in the civilian market they'd be called "RC planes".

RC planes are less popular than quadcopters for hobby use, as it takes a lot more skill to avoid crashing them.

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