Both are better than Garret in his 2007 Ford Explorer driving around town all day delivering timbits and tacos.
A van can hold thousands of 2-ounce packages, whereas a drone can hold one. If you look at it in terms of a one-package utilization rate, a van has over 100% rate, because it holds multiple packages, in fact it may have over a 1000% utilization rate using that metric.
You're essentially wasting tons of energy and resources getting very small packages delivered faster, but in urban setting there are no efficiencies here, quite the contrary.
Obviously it would take a lot longer than a direct flight, but the energy consumed would be far less.
Or, people should just make a sandwich.
But Uber eats and DoorDash are a reality, and I would pay someone to pick something up for me from Home Depot within the next hour. Services like Zipline have the potential to help out there.
I've long thought this. UPS isn't driving from the hub to my house to deliver a package, 90% of the incremental driving distance is the length of my driveway.
In a perfect world, yes. In reality, no. You would need a perfect storm of a huge wave of orders all to the same restaurant (or cluster of restaurants) to be delivered to the same neighborhood to ensure timely delivery so the food was hot and the customers were happy. In real life, you are almost guaranteed to never hit the ideal conditions.
Edit: After re-reading your comment, I’d agree with you for the non-food deliveries. My comment was obviously focused more on the UberEats use case.
A locomotive would be even more efficient over long distances, carrying 200,000,000 such packages. A containership even more so, carrying more than 20x the capacity of a big freight train, though I don't think they have the draft to fit up the drainage ditch behind my house. Nor do I have rails.
I jest, but the long tail is a real problem with such efficiency calculations.
You're right that it's never going to make sense to have migrating swarms of drones flying above the interstate carrying packages cross-country, but are real efficiencies here at the individual level:
https://www.cell.com/cms/attachment/4b8da4bb-42c2-4b91-baf2-...
Graphic from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2022.100569.
No, last mile delivery is made package by package. If you place 100 packages in a van and go delivering them, you will make 100 mostly independent trips, just carrying all the packages at once.
That's why those are very often done by motorcycle.
But indeed there is often a highly correlated trip segment. The Amazon's model of running a van into your neighborhood and distributing things there by drones may make sense. It doesn't make sense for Uber Eats business model, but it makes sense for Amazon.
What’s more rude? Ordering takeout in bad weather, or not ordering takeout and indirectly punishing the delivery driver’s livelihood whenever the weather is bad..?
Delivery drivers are paid basically solely with your tips.
If you don't order, they don't make any money that day.
If you want to be nice, order that delivery, but tip more.
Bad weather is actually their favorite because people tip more.
Some Californians think that any weather at all is bad, and some midwesterners think “there’s no such thing as bad weather, only wrong clothing”.
I wouldn’t hesitate to order delivery if it were raining or snowing, but maybe in this world there are people who would still order delivery during a tornado warning (because that way they don’t have to risk driving during a tornado).
If it's genuinely life-threatening out, an actual tornado warning, then nobody's delivering in the first place. You can't order delivery even if you want.
It's up to the business and driver (or mayor ordering all non-essential vehicles off the road). Not you.