Walkable and safe streets.
Not complaining, but I just don’t really care for self driving cars personally. Seems like a waste of money when we don’t even have good streets and transit.
Drones are loud, and it can't be avoided (they need to move air to provide lift, and doing so creates vibration - I.e noise). Cars are definitely loud but not on the scale of a swarm of drones.
Drones don't have the cargo capacity of, e.g. a moderately sized van.
We don't have the traffic management policies for low air traffic, and we do have those policies already for street traffic.
Most importantly, deliveries don't account for the majority of traffic: in fact, most commercial deliveries happen at off hours for traffic. If you eliminated deliveries in cities, you may get rid of some annoying double parked Amazon vans, but you wouldn't meaningfully reduce traffic. The majority of traffic is people in personal automobiles (usually one or two per several ton SUV).
We get walkable and safe streets by changing our building codes and parking requirements to make walkable neighborhoods legal to build. And by building useful public transit, at a local and regional level. And by incentivizing personal mobility options like (e-)bikes and scooters, while disinventivizing cars. But delivery vehicles, along with work trucks and vans: I have no problem with them staying exactly as is. If we get rid of the vast majority of personal vehicle traffic, then commercial delivery vans will be no big deal, and small deliveries will happen via ebikes and cargo ebikes. No need for drones!
Cars and trucks just take up way too much space. They also pollute. I like scooters but they don’t have a lot of range:time advantage. At least with drones you could deploy relay style movement so the drones could move items between multiple drones, of various types and capabilities, to get the item to the final destination. Or work in tandem with the scooter people.
Well it turns out that human tend to enjoy the ability to open a windows and look at the sky while enjoying birds. This is hardly compatible with a cool way for delivery service to navigate in 3D space 24/7.
I once hiked on a remote part of a beautiful island where helicopters is the only viable delivery system because there is literally no road. Even with very limited and restricted helicopters delivery rotations for the small hamlets there the nuisance was noticeable.
Drone delivery only to sustain a megalopolis would likely fill the air with background sound not unlike an army of barking dogs.
No, barking dogs would be far worse. Drones are just a constant buzz or whir, so they're basically white noise, though the noise gradually changes in pitch and volume as the drones move around due to distance and doppler effect. Dog barking is sharp and irregular. Sane humans find that far, far more annoying.
Having smaller deliveries by drone could be quiet and nice if they invent anti-gravity systems (or "suspensors"). But that probably won't come until after we have ornithopters...
In many iconic areas of SF it's illegal to use those video camera drones because of the disruption they cause, in terms of noise, and also disrupting beautiful scenery. And those are drones with nowhere near the capacity to carry a few hundred pounds of cargo. Do you want some quadcopter with a few cases of beer blaring their rotors past your bedroom window all night because there's "cool ways to navigate 3d space"? Personally, I don't.
> Besides when have regulations stopped startups from defining something new and better?
Maybe different strokes for different folks, but this is the exact attitude I actively dislike when it comes to city planning. "Just let the venture capitalists throw their shitty tech project into the city and let the city workers clean up the mess". It's not a good strategy for transportation planning. In fact, I'd far rather that elected officials make a weird and crazy decision with little community input (we can always reverse it and vote them out) rather than a VC funded startup trying to "disrupt" local transit in my area.
> Cars and trucks just take up way too much space. They also pollute. I like scooters but they don’t have a lot of range:time advantage.
Fully agree right up to the range/time thing. Electric mobility devices on the street, with even the shitty infrastructure SF has, are like a cheat code to transit. Traffic can't go that fast in a dense city, so scooters and the like don't need to go that fast to outdo, or at least rival them. And as for range: SF is 7x7 miles, it's a very limited problem in a city. Plus, Lyft is introducing 20+ mile range heavy ebikes for trips which may be a bit beyond the city.
> At least with drones you could deploy relay style movement so the drones could move items between multiple drones, of various types and capabilities, to get the item to the final destination. Or work in tandem with the scooter people.
And none of this solves the root cause of traffic: personal mobility. Unless we're having drones ferrying people Jetsons style, i.e. helicopter noise all over the city, then this is just a pipe dream that doesn't alleviate traffic, but ruins the cityscape and dramatically increases noise pollution.
The original argument I'm pushing back against is that by replacing deliveries in cities, drones could deliver the car-free pedestrian/cycling utopia of our dreams.
I think owls disprove that theory. If it can’t be avoided to create noise for flight then how do they do it? After all they create lift, yet somehow avoid being as noisy as an equivalent size or weight drone would.
Edit: OK, on reread this is far more snarky than is deserved. Sorry!
I get what you're saying about the noise per unit weight! Clearly nature has potential ways to improve on the technology, though I have to wonder how much development is necessary until a drone could restock my corner store at the same noise level as a van does.
Overall, my larger concern, which should have been listed first, is that delivery traffic is not the primary cause of traffic on our roads. Eliminating it won't solve our transit issues in cities.
Oh I 100% agree with your point. Using drones to deliver everyday items in dense cities is a silly idea in my opinion.
I just don't think that noise is inevitable. But I think the reasoning stands even without that assumption.
Saw saw this video the other day. Check out the drone around 13:55 regarding noise and rotor design. The whole video is worth a watch though.
The company is zipline which is mentioned in a comment above.
Of course, still far too small to be able to deliver e.g. a fridge, but can easily handle your typical food or small package deliveries.
You don't need to wait for some sci-fi future to get this, you just need to move someplace where this (or something closer to it) is the reality, which means not-America.
Here in Tokyo, the "walkable and safe streets" part is the norm. There's still cars of course, and there's no drone delivery, but you don't really need those things to have walkable and safe streets. You just need high density, and infrastructure designed more for people than for cars (so, very small roads most places, very little parking, low speed limits, sidewalks on all streets except tiny 1-lane residential streets, etc.). And of course you need really good public transit. There's still roads, of course, which is how trucks get around to move cargo and do deliveries, and also how taxis get around, but overall "walkable and safe" describes this place perfectly.
It's not just Japan either: lots of cities in Europe have this as well. Go check out Berlin, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Munich, Prague, or many more.
In a nutshell, if you want "walkable and safe", you need to move out of the US.