Troubled Amazon drone delivery program faces latest challenge: Annoyed residents | Hacker News Reader

Troubled Amazon drone delivery program faces latest challenge: Annoyed residents

cnbc.com

33 pointsrntn44 comments

>Bryan Woods, College Station’s city manager, said at the meeting that city officials ran tests of a Prime Air drone and found it had noise levels between 47 and 61 decibels.

That's surprisingly quiet. I don't know the situation in Texas, but 40% of the EU population is exposed to road traffic noise exceeding 55 dBA. My own back garden exceeds 60dBA for most of the day, with regular peaks closer to 70 dBA due to railway noise.

https://www.who.int/europe/news-room/fact-sheets/item/noise

I imagine the higher frequency makes a difference at the same dBA?

A-weighting takes into account our greater sensitivity to higher frequencies. It isn't perfect due to the complexities of how we perceive noise, but it's generally quite reliable.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-weighting

Imagine that every so often, without warning, a 47-61 db house fly buzzes somewhere in your house. I'd grab a swatter and hunt it down before it disturbed me again.

Not sure adding to this existing problem is a good idea. Non-electric cars should be completely banned from city centers sooner or later. Noise is a hugely underestimated source of stress (and by proxy, illness).

Automated deliveries by bots are fine, but they don't have to be in the sky. Learn from China, they've already perfected parcel delivery with electronic delivery boxes in basically every community. All that's left to do is take out the human deliveryman, which they aren't doing yet because wages are so cheap. But in the US it might already be profitable, if not yet it will be very soon.

Electric cars are honestly just as noisy. Aside from big diesel trucks or wannabe fast n furious characters, you don’t really hear engine noise. You hear road noise from the tires, which is worse with weight and therefore worse with heavier evs.

The decibels is probably less the issue than the actual tone/pitch. It’s not that it’s so loud it makes your ears hurt, it’s that the pitch of the sound is extremely grating.

This made me wonder how long ago Bezos had announced they were going to do this drone delivery thing. I would've guessed 4 or 5 years, but it was 2013.

  During a 2013 "60 Minutes" interview, Jeff Bezos, who was still Amazon's CEO at the time, famously predicted that Amazon's patented delivery drones could be operational within five years.

https://www.commercialuavnews.com/drone-delivery/what-the-la...

Well, it was before he met his new wife, wasn’t it? It seems to me that coincided with his shift of priorities.

I can’t help but think they’re doing this in the wrong places. I get that areas dense with consumers might seem like the ideal market to deploy in, but the marginal utility over a van plus the noise issue makes it less attractive.

Where I earnestly think this could shine is in rural areas, particularly those where tortured terrain makes the roads a pain in the ass. Parts of Appalachia and the northwest spring to mind in the U.S.

Where I live in Portugal, my nearest city is 12km as the crow flies - or 55km by road. I literally cannot get mail delivered where I live, and have to drive 20km (6km as the crow flies) to the village post office to collect it, and I’m not alone in that.

Air seems like a no-brainier here, and I’d wager there would be induced demand and few people to bother.

Drones that fly that far would be too expensive

I’m not convinced that the flights are any longer - just in a sparser environment.

If the flights are longer, fixed wing drones are used to deliver cold chain medicine across hundreds of km in Africa, very cost effectively, and are returned by road by the recipient, which isn’t an impossible model either.

Little-known fact about current drone deliveries: you can only deliver to people with a garden. People with gardens are a very small percentage of the population.

Until Amazon (or others) can solve delivering to a balcony or a letterbox, they'll not be able to deliver to high-density population areas.

I have a patio and a balcony in my apartment. I would love if they could use them.

rooftop delivery bays might become a thing

What constitutes a garden? Does a small front lawn count?

Europeans use the word "garden" in the place where Americans would use "yard"

I always though sidewalk delivery drones were more practical. Amazon was experimenting with them but seems to have given up.

A few companies are still going (Kiwibot and Starship are the best known) but they certainly haven't taken off as fast as I expected.

As I understand it, public airspace starts at about 500 feet from ground. Is a delivery drone flying lower than that over your property trespassing?

I would personally be furious to have these things flying around my home. Noise aside, these things almost certainly have cameras streaming back to Amazon.

People in Texas wanting tougher regulation of noise. Who would have thought?

Relevant Dust reference: [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHjgJWYj4Pk

It is like people saying Houston has no zoning, which is technically true, but they just use other mechanisms to restrict land use in the same manner, like deed covenants and parking minimums. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/article/...

Replace "drone" by "car"... I think it's a legit complaint but I also think people don't remotely care enough about noise pollution to give up the convenience. On average anyway.

I don’t understand how anyone ever thought this could be a workable idea.

We had an asshole neighbor fly a quite large drone over my wife working in her garden and she was terrified. It was shockingly loud. I had a very strong desire to reach for the 20 gauge. Apparently that asshole behavior is legal!

I hear about things like this delivery program and yes I just die laughing that it could be considered a good idea.

Drone noise destroys the wilderness concept too.

Flying above your lawn might be legal, but loud noise and privacy invasion might be illegal, regardless of technology involved. Call the cops next time.

I called the cops. They did not show up. And the ordinance that I read at the time was vague, and that means the interpretation goes the way the cop wants it to go.

I was pretty upset to find out that the FAA considers shooting at any aircraft a felony, including drones that are stalking you or flying above your property.

Anyone who believes that the government is on their side needs to have their head examined.

stock up on fishing line. nothing compels you to clear the way for drones on your own property.

What if you crash a kite, or another drone in to it?

> I had a very strong desire to reach for the 20 gauge.

As the guy maybe living next to your neighbor, please consider a water hose if the urges get too strong.

You are implying that the drone noise you heard is the same as an Amazon drone’s noise. That is not necessarily true. It’s possible that the Amazon drones are quieter than the drone from your “asshole neighbor”.

You can’t logically compare the sound of two different drones to arrive at your conclusion of “all drones = bad”.

Oh yes I can. I don't care if there are a variety of levels and flavors. Noise over my yard from somebody else sucks.

ICE noise on the road sucks too, there's a reason freeways have massive investments in sound barriers.

Especially when much more practical ideas have been under our feet: https://www.pipedreamlabs.co/

That's a lot of vehicle for hardly any cargo though. If it gets stuck in a bad way do you have to dig up the street?

I always wondered why people were not thinking of noise when they think of package delivery drones. Even the garden variety light weight drones makes quite an amount of noise.

This is the same reason that 'flying cars', which in many sense are big drones, is very unlikely to be an everyday thing.

Sure, but to be fair it's not like UPS trucks are silent.

The UPS truck engine doesn't need to come up to nearly full power to park in my driveway. The driver doesn't ever need to "floor it."

All the delivery drivers on my street seem to drive at full power while flooring it.

When they merely tap on the gas the truck belches a “GLLLRRFGGGGG” and when they reverse it goes “ding ding ding ding ding ding ding”

They don’t need to, but often do from my experience. Electric delivery and garbage trucks can’t soon enough to my neighborhood.

I'm starting to see electric delivery trucks.

They don't care about you, the quality of the experience, the quality of the delivery. They just want to save money on labor. Everything else seems to be a secondary consideration to them.

Mark Rober covered the “Zipline” drones which are near silent, unlike almost any other drone you hear. There’s a demo in the video.

Done by varying the propeller design so that the noise is spread out over many frequencies instead of concentrated in the buzzy band.

I also remember Apple talking about doing the same in their MacBook pro fans at one point. Varying the blade pitch from blade to blade to do the same.

https://youtu.be/DOWDNBu9DkU?si=jW6Iaeobg7j5yAzW

Reply on news.ycombinator.com