As with everything, the buzzkill is regulatory and administrative rather than technical. We could easily make drone delivery a thing but the paperwork will kill it.
Tesla's autopilot is the best example that the hurdles are not regulatory in nature, no matter what musk is trying to tell us.
As of now, these machines will kill people on the regular. Even in situations that a human could handle. And that's the bar we're setting and I'm glad we do so.
Edit: I know that people are killing people on the regular in situations that a machine could handle. And introducing this stuff as safety systems (like autonomous emergency breaking) is not hindered by regulation.
One of the most effective ways is to get as many people to use something other than cars for transportation. You do that by making cycling, walking and public transport faster and saver.
Car dependence is not sustainable. Infrastructure costs need to be covered by the income they generate.
That is not the case with car dependent cities.
Here is an excellent playlist about how car dependence is so expensive: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6...
YT channel suggestion: "Not just bikes"
I've always thought it was a perverse conclusion that the way to make someone operate heavy machinery more safely is to increase cognitive load of the people operating them.
Why not have a the straight roads you describe, with rigid automatic enforcement and penalities that take dangerous drivers off the road? And then put in place infrastructure to make sure that not driving a car is a viable option, so that stricter enforcement has public support. I see this option as a self-reinforcing route to reducing car use.
In all my experience with high-visibility roads, even though you'd expect people to be better able to pay attention to everything on road with good visibility and clear markings, they actually seem much worse in those conditions. And given the ways in which they are worse, it's not clear how automatic enforcement would work; speed limits and traffic signals can be enforced, and perhaps crosswalks, with cameras, but often regulations seem focused on banning, rather than encouraging, this sort of enforcement.
(Also, turn-on-red is such a weird idea. Especially as, from the sound of it, the rules vary from locale to locale.)
Planting trees near the streets, narrower lanes, speed humps, roundabouts are all measures with a proven record that they improve safety.
Crossings should also be one lane at a time.
> In all my experience with high-visibility roads, even though you'd expect people to be better able to pay attention to everything on road with good visibility and clear markings, they actually seem much worse in those conditions
This is nothing new. You shouldn't design a street like a road. You will end up with something called a stroad, that is bad at both beeing a street(a place where you can live, shop and whatever) and a road(something that connects two places)
Stroads are ugly, inefficient and dangerous. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM
Wow, I never saw this phrased like that.
(It's not the norm -- there are more streets that a pedestrian can easily walk into -- but it's not uncommon either.)
You don't need to make driving a car a nonviable option. Making walking into the street nonviable is just as good.
But the catch is that people doing things optimize for static cognitive load. In practice this means slowing down so "stuff" that demands thinking happens less readily when other things take up brain cycles. So you can get them to drive slower by adding "stuff" to the road. There are right and wrong ways to do this. Generally you try not to limit visibility.
Remember, the goal is safer, not slower. And slower is just a crude proxy for that. With big multi-lane roads your best bet is generally to try and normalize traffic speeds or segregate traffic based on speed (truck lanes, bike lanes, sidewalks, etc).
>Why not have a the straight roads you describe, with rigid automatic enforcement and penalities that take dangerous drivers off the road?
Because in a democracy with even enforcement they vote out the people who implemented such a system and with uneven enforcement it just turns into a system of extracting revenue from whichever groups nobody cares about. Orwellian crap like that simply doesn't fly in most of the world.
If regulation was focused on function it would be less expensive and yield better results for society.
> ... is not hindered by regulation.
It is effectively stymied by added total cost.
And of course, regulation can not cover every case. And if it turns out to be a problem, we can cover the additional cases. This way (in Europe at least) we gradually require cars to be safer for passengers and the environment.
But I think GP is wrong in considering this to be a problem. Rules may be expressed in a non-functional way, but that's often just a way to embody functional rules in a heuristic that doesn't require expertise to apply.
For a computing example, you may have a processing algorithm that has a tendency to explode in computational complexity on some datasets, because of complicated algorithmic reasons. Instead of explaining the exact problem to users, most of whom will not be able to understand it, you could determine that the failure mode is very unlikely to happen for smaller datasets, and just say "the input should be no larger than 10MB in size".
Other reason for "form, not function" is coordination - there may be many good ways to do something, but all of them require everyone to do the same thing. So it makes sense to pick a reasonable default and tell everyone to stick to it.
... and that would actually require that those in charge of regulations would be technical enough to understand the complexities involved. If you're that good with technical matters and can confidently reason about the wider second- and third-order effects, you are likely to have a bright - and better compensated - future in the industry at large.
If you are a regulator, you have to confront two facts. 1) that the most competent will either never be available or will leave at the first opportunity; and 2) that box-ticking is much easier to measure.
In the end, you have to ask yourself who are you left with?
Having 10-30kg high-speed flying machines, built by the lowest bidder and operated by companies that like to move fast and break things, being hurled around above densely populated areas full of squishy people and car traffic... how long do you think it will take before a first fatality? Do you want to live in constant fear of getting hit in the head by a low-flying brick?
No, a thick regulatory straitjacket is the only thing that can enable drone delivery in cities. But then, there's little point to even do that, until the noise issues are resolved.
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On a related (and likely just as improbable) note, perhaps cities should start treating delivery as another municipal utility. Right now, most houses and apartments in a typical city are fitted with pipes that bring in water, gas and fresh air, and take away sewage and stale air. I can envision another utility - a "package pipe" - a conceptual blend between old-school pneumatic tubes and parcel sorters. Imagine each apartment having an outlet sized for a standardized container[0], through which packages could be sent and received. I bet it could cover upwards of 90% of delivery needs of any town - most things people send would fit, larger orders could be split into multiple containers, and bulkier things would be delivered by trucks on-demand.
An installation like this would deliver all the benefits and solve all the problems of in-city drone delivery, cheaper, safer, better, and without any of the noise issues.
The obvious drawback would be the costs of building it up and maintaining it. Someone would need to do a calculation, but I suspect it could be paid for the same way other utilities are (small fixed payment for access + pay per use + whatever other bullshit business shenanigans electricity providers usually engage in). Looking at the cities I've been in, most existing buildings could be retrofitted with it as an external attachment (imagine an external lift going to every apartment). The big problem I envision is routing the inter-building segments of the pipeline - it would likely have to be above ground due to size, and thus expose it to the usual problem of landowners trying to extract as much money as they can from the public to let the project go through their plot.
But hey, one can dream :).
(My bigger dream is that one day, we'll all have something resembling a Star Trek matter replicator, perhaps in a form of sophisticated 3D printer fed from a municipal "matter stream" supply.)
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[0] - Say, UPS 10kg - "16.5in x 13.25in x 10.75in (42cm x 34cm x 27cm); weight limit 22lbs/10kg", or UPS 25kg - "19.75in x 17.75in x 13.25in (50cm x 45cm x 34cm); weight limit 55lbs/25kg". Via https://www.ups.com/us/en/shipping/create/package-type-help.....
Much better than 2,000-4,000kg driving machines being operated at street level by the people willing to do the work for the lowest pay.
These machines kill thousands of people every year. This method of delivery is also very costly relative to autonomous drones, making a huge number of goods inaccessible to millions of people.
No, it's not much better. Cars may be heavier, but they're constrained in their movements. They (mostly) follow the road network. It's easier to keep track of them, as you only have to scan the 360° plane around you. A drone could hit you anywhere, from any angle, so you have to pay attention to the whole half-sphere around you.
Additionally, cars are already here, and delivery services are only a small fraction of car traffic. Drone delivery will not displace any significant amount of cars from the streets, so drones will have to operate alongside car traffic. And I can't think of a better way for a civilian drone to cause large amounts of damage than crashing into traffic.
And, of course, car transportation is already in a regulatory straitjacket - one that was built gradually over the past century, rule by rule, one fatality at a time. It would be wise to not go through the same process with drones.
I think a magnetron from a microwave oven attached to a directional antenna should just do the trick :).
Hmm, or maybe national governments should step in and provide this as a subsidized basic service to everyone. It could work for all kinds of post, not just packages. And we could go to great lengths to make it work also across borders! I suggest we call it something like a public postal service.
:-)
But here I was thinking about technology and logistics. In-city drone-based delivery promises features that neither public nor private delivery services can... deliver ( :) ). The package stream utility idea promises those same features and more, without the drawbacks of having fleets of lawnmower/brick hybrids zipping around everyone's heads.
Universal service --- whether telegraph, rail, telephone, air, postal service, or data networking --- doesn't have that option. It serves both the dense, high-margin zones and the low-density, low-value outlying regions, because it has the interest of the common weal as a whole, not merely profit.
Worse, the private sector then attempts to change legislation and regulation to impose greater burdens on the public-sector services they compete with (as with USPS pension liability funding obligations).
Government-run postal services are tremendously efficient, effective, fast, and reliable ... at least until they became actively sabotaged from within.
Because they don't.
This used to be called a postal service.
I look forward to the jurisdiction fights over city-run package delivery; I expect Fedex to make substantial donations to state legislatures to have it banned, as happened for city-level broadband.
It's no wonder the difficult part was when the drones came in to land. That one washing line that's hard to spot, the overjoyed dog jumping up at what he thinks is a new toy, that grass field that was actually an overgrown pond...