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Comment by pyrale | Hacker News Reader

> The experience in College Station has highlighted another challenge: NIMBYs—or people who push for developments to be “not in my backyard”—potentially curtailing where Amazon operates.

The term NIMBY seems to have been popularized to refer to people dogmatically refusing any change, doesn't seem to apply here, where the article describes a real nuisance:

> His neighbors began calling the fleet flying chainsaws. Smith, a retired civil engineer, preferred a different comparison: “It was like your neighbor runs their leaf blower all day long,” he says. “It was just incessant.”

> If Amazon had conducted the maximum number of flights outlined in its plans reviewed by the FAA, a drone might have buzzed by Smith’s house about every 58 seconds for 15 hours a day.

> [After the end of the experiment,] Inside his house, with the double-paned windows shut and TV on, Smith could no longer hear the drones.

View on HN

Funnily enough, the fact that these drones are being employed to deliver "toothpaste and batteries" is really kind of a perfect microcosm of the kind of American planning and zoning foundational to modern NIMBYism—in a different environment, daily necessities like that would be available at a corner store very close to where people live, but we've found it preferable to make such restrictive residential areas and require businesses to have large parking lots such that corner stores have disappeared in favor of strip malls and big box stores, and now we're trying to replace those with annoying drones.

But there's also an efficiency argument there.

If technology now allows us to JIT distribute from a single store / warehouse across a larger area, isn't that better?

Imho, the real problem with American suburban design is (a) the elimination of spaces where community organically happens (read: corner store) without replacement with something else (e.g. a park) & (b) the centralization of corporate power enabled by monopolies (e.g. Amazon logistics).

To (b), I'd much prefer if drone distribution centers like this were city-owned property, with the drone service provided by one or more drone operators, with adjacent warehouse space for any company that wanted to distribute.

Well, it's also possible that delivery drones at scale maybe just have an unavoidable noise pollution factor. Sure, roads do too but those are pretty much a given even in areas with density that supports good public transit--and maybe especially if--see e.g. Manhattan. (And it's not like trains don't cause noise pollution too.)

Aside from the odd military helicopter from a nearby training area, I have pretty much zero audible air traffic at my house. I would very much object to large drones overhead on a regular basis.

Manhattan is pretty far on the other extreme. In the kind of medium density typical of European cities (dense rows of 3-6 story townhouses) you have enough density to support excellent public transit and multiple supermarkets in walking distance while having very moderate road noise outside of arterial roads. Delivery drones would absolutely increase noise pollution in such places

Ironically, there was some griping about the amount of tourist helicopter sightseeing traffic around Manhattan recently.

E.g. https://council.nyc.gov/gale-brewer/helicopters/

That is true most streets are after all only used by the locals who live on that street. It is also quiet in the evening.

It isn’t efficient when you factor in the cost of such small deliveries.

Also having some form of slack in the system goes a very long way in making the system resilient, especially in a system where your provider’s interests are not aligned with yours.

Cost in terms of what? Electric drone delivery is likely more cost-effective (external-accounted) than any of the alternative solutions.

Well, and a lot of people don't want to pay the premium usually associated with a bodega/corner store if they don't need to. I frequented some local camera stores over the years when they were more of a thing and, however rose-colored glasses I want to view them through, they weren't that great relative to today's options.

In Europe there's a good chance the 'corner shop' is run by a national business or franchise, benefitting from their supply and logistics systems.

That means prices are usually the same as in their larger stores, although the cheapest (low margin) brands might not be stocked in the smaller ones.

I would never consider buying toothpaste or normal batteries online. What a hassle! Just take the packet off the shelf in the small supermarket that's at the end of my street, or the one by the station, or the one near the station by work, on the one just the other side of work.

This is one supermarket chain in Denmark, and you'll note I haven't centred the map on the middle of Copenhagen but the suburbs: https://www.google.com/maps/search/Netto/@55.736038,12.46374...

I think this conversation has gotten a little exaggerated or maybe just over-specific to the bay area, the US is full of corner shops operated by famous brands like 7-11. They're usually combined with gas stations. The American phrase is "convenience store." You have to leave your suburban housing development to go to them, but if you live in the city they're probably within walking distance. They don't exist in the sphere of highly paid professionals, though, because they're eminently practical from a commercial standpoint and sell inexpensive junk food, novelty knives, figurines, cigarettes, and whatever you'd imagine being there just to move off the shelves. I've only seen useful goods in a handful of them, and it's always sold in tiny quantities (imagine buying a single roll of toilet paper) because their clientele might not have the capital to invest in bulk purchases.

If you want to put this in a sort of social context, it's that laborers actually have quite a bit of money in America because having a lot of cash relative to the price of goods is the one part of the promise that comes true, and as a result they're catered to by a lot of retail. Those inexpensive retail outlets are the subject of endless complaints from people who you could call the conscious middle class and make up most of what you would think of as cheap American consumerism. The quintessential duo of Walmart and McDonalds is exceeded by convenience stores along this dimension and for most HN users, they don't exist in that they never think about them, and post things like "I don't have a corner shop."

I'm not sure of all the reasons but you absolutely do have a lot of smaller supermarkets in Europe with chains like Sainsbury, Tesco, Waitrose, and so forth (most familiar with UK) which are certainly smaller than most US supermarkets but pretty price competitive with decent products. As you say, in the US you have convenience stores which are pretty crappy for anything other than junk food or buying a coke. Even in NYC, I'm not sure bodegas are much better.

I wasn't clear.

7-11 exists in Denmark more-or-less as you describe (bit more food, less junk).

The Netto shops I linked to are small supermarkets, selling a full range of groceries — fresh fruit and vegetables, meat, fish, bread, cheese, milk, eggs, pasta, rice, toiletries, cleaning products, light bulbs, ... I need hardly describe a grocery store. Toilet paper comes in a pack of 8 or 10 or so. Meat is probably in 250g and 500g packs, with a couple of options at 1kg. There are 6 kinds of toothpaste, 6 types of rice etc.

In much of the city, there are multiple shops like this within 5 minutes' walk.

I do the majority of my grocery shopping in a shop like this, which is why I'd never consider buying toothpaste online.

> They don't exist in the sphere of highly paid professionals, though, because they're eminently practical from a commercial standpoint and sell inexpensive junk food, novelty knives, figurines, cigarettes, and whatever you'd imagine being there just to move off the shelves.

That's a different thing. What they're talking about is, effectively, just a very small supermarket, usually run by national chains. I have in walking distance of me about six instances of Tesco; one big one, one medium one, three small ones (single storefront) and one tiny one (convenience store sized). They all have basically the same core stock, at _mostly_ the same prices (I think the really tiny one is a little more expensive).

What a hassle! I click a button and 6 months supply of the exact toothpaste I like arrives at my doorstep as early as same day.

While I oppose restrictive zoning, that fixing that isn't going to change the situation. Where people live is a compromise and the single family house in the suburb has some great properties that mean many people will choose that set of compromises. The density of single family houses doesn't support a corner store. It did before the automobile/streetcar, but now that those are common people will prefer to travel to to the much cheaper big-box store (which also has more selection) for most purchases and that doesn't leave enough "I just ran out of one thing" to support a corner store.

Don't get me wrong, there will be more corner stores if they are allowed. However the economics of retail mean that most single family homes cannot not be in walking distance of a corner store. It gets worse when you account for single family houses being so car dependent people will out of habit drive to their neighbors even though the walk from where they park their car is longer than the door to door walk.

People go on walks or bike in their neighborhood all the time. A suburban neighborhood could absolutely support a corner store with a handful of parking spots. We just don't allow for the experiment to even happen due to zoning regulations.

The zoning also is way too specific. Not far from my house is a busy intersection that has stuff like pawn shops and a run-down 7/11 at it. Very close to the intersection is a lot that's been empty for at least a decade now. A few years ago my wife and I thought we should look up what it costs and see if we can just pave it and put a food cart pot down. Turns out you can't do it. You must build a two-unit building with a specific number of rooms and square footage. WTF?! It's like a planned economy for housing. Needles to say, the lot is still empty because nobody wants to build a home like that in that location.

The magic word is "variance" - the problem is it takes time (not even money, usually just time) to popularize an idea and get it publicly accepted and then pushed through the city council.

I've seen it done; sometimes it takes a few months because it's simple and nobody cares, other times it takes years.

And often the city council is itself playing the long game; waiting for the pawn shop and 7/11 to go out of business or sell, and then they snap it up, bulldoze it, and sell it to a developer who will build what they envision for the plot.

Something that turned me on to these issues in the first place was reading through the P&Z committee minutes for my rural New England hometown, where simply opening a hair salon in an existing, vacant commercial space in the village center has been a multi-year affair because their variance for not having off-street parking expired when the previous business closed.

It's in a 150 year old commercial building and has had a variety of even higher-traffic businesses in it for decades, but now the town has created this artificial barrier to filling the existing space, which clearly functioned just fine before (the town has plenty of parking), and is dragging the process out through meeting after meeting. It's frustrating to watch.

It's surprising how little effort is needed to move the needle on those kinds of things. If you started showing up at meetings and complaining about wanting the hair salon, it could be the difference between tabling for another month and letting it through.

Especially if the number of people complaining keeps growing.

I've seen it happen. The vast majority of these things go so far under the radar that it's no wonder the decision is often the "conservative" one (by which I mean status quo, the activity that requires no activity).

So, as an ignorant foreigner... surely someone already _has_ tried this, right? Like, I gather US zoning is pretty localised; there has to be _some_ local authority who has tried it.

Sure, to greater and lesser degrees! Prominent master-planned examples include Seaside, FL [0]; Celebration, the Disney-designed suburb near Orlando with its “town center”; and, in a less ambitious variant, The Villages, a collection of retirement communities notionally premised on “village”-scale lifestyle (and accessibility by golf cart) [1].

My impression is that people like them just fine when they get built, it’s just not The Way Things Are Done at the (rather local) planning level. Maybe more about inertia than malice—and, like so much of the built environment, planning today is accountable to the accumulated political weight of all the individual families’ and developers’ decisions that led up to this point.

[0] https://www.theamericanconservative.com/new-urbanist-paradis...

[1] https://www.thevillages.com/shopping-dining/

US zoning is complex. While final control is local, the state and federal government puts rules in place. The feds mostly if you do X you get some subsidy (loans for single family houses for example). States often set the rules that locals abide by - the local says some area is R1 (single family), R5 (apartments I think), C1 (retail but I'm not sure what type).... but state law says what those codes mean. The local can choose which of the zones an area is but probably cannot create new ones. The local can give a variance for you to do something not allowed, but everyone who wants it needs to follow state rules.

Remember zoning has been around for around 100 years. The rules change all the time. What I gave as examples were true at some point in history when I looked this up but may not be today. There are 50 states with their own rules. Some states have things like counties that sit between the state and the local. Generally states look at what others are doing and follow that with tweaks, but not always (New York and California are most likely to do their own thing - and they are the most populas states so they matter even if a minority of the total.)

The reality of many countries show that people are not averse to local shopping. They only become so if there are no really good options to use a car and drive a few miles to buy a single toothpaste.

What you say is likely true. I've seen even crazier developments though. Not super far from me is a giant development of 3-4 story apartment buildings. It's easily a mile long and 1000ft wide. Just identical mid-rise buildings but not a single store, cafe or restaurant. It's truly the worst of both worlds. No privacy and space and zero walkability. Even by car the next decent grocery store is 5 minutes away.

Entirety of Irvine, California

They can only afford to live in those single family houses in the suburbs because they don't have to pay the full cost of the infrastructure to run miles and miles all the way out to their house. It's being subsidized by the taxes paid by folks in the inner cities.

Then why do cities keep annexing suburbs? If they are such a resource sink you would think the opposite would be true - cities would shrink their borders.

The people doing the annexing gain power and influence by extending their reach and base of constituents, but they don't (as individuals) pay the price of supporting those neighborhoods.

In our cities history, it was EXPLICITLY to maintain republican control of local government. The city, it's like 200 years history, has REPEATEDLY split and consumed neighboring locals full of rich white guys to maintain a rich white republican control.

The is a strong towns talking point, but it is completely wrong. The first suburbs were built in the 1880s, 140 years latter they have built and rebuilt all their infrastructure.

Most of a city budget isn't even the infrastructure costs you claim they are not paying. If you expand out to the state where the highways are paid for the cost of infrastructure is even smaller as a percentage of the budget.

Densities have changed quite a bit across American suburbs over time—Brooklyn Heights, considered to be one of the first commuter "suburbs" in the 1800s is like 75k/people per square mile, Levittown, perhaps the first real planned cul-de-sac community in the late 40s: 7.5k, whereas a modern single family subdivision suburb is more like 2.5k.

That is mostly about birthrates. The number of houses is similear.

Either that or your are cherry-picking your examples. Where I live the suburbs from the 1920s are slightly less dense than the developments they are building right now.

Suburbs used to be built with convenient access to businesses until 1946. They aren't mutually exclusive features of a pleasant neighborhood. Most American's have never experienced a well functioning old suburb and don't realize the scale of the hellscapes they are really living in.

Just because you prefer to live somewhere else doesn't make it a "hellscape." How would you react if someone called a city block like people on this thread are romanticizing a "hellscape?"

If suburbs are truly people's preference then we shouldn't need laws to mandate their existence

Right. Given what the laws allow a suburb is often your best compromise. However the laws often force things that make your other options even worse.

That is laws mandating suburbs are not the only evil. There are also laws that mandate bad cities.

I can think of multiple “corner stores” that are the only business within a single-family home residential area within a few minutes drive of the house I grew up in in suburban NY. I’m pretty sure they all got grandfathered in and would not be permitted as new construction with the zoning, but they’ve all been in business since before I was born and are still going. These are mostly neighborhoods without sidewalks, and the stores have parking for only a handful of cars.

You’re right that “most” houses can’t be within walking distance of a corner store outside cities, but my anecdata experience is those residential communities can definitely support those businesses. They might require a short drive, but they’re still a lot closer than the shopping center, and a mix of “ran out of one thing”, deli/breakfast sandwiches, and beer keeps them in business.

I suspect many of them are grandfathered in economically too - they are not generating enough income to support starting a new one, but the family has had it for years and never ran the numbers to see just how badly they are doing. (or maybe they only work so long as the equipment doesn't break)

> The density of single family houses doesn't support a corner store. It did before the automobile/streetcar, but now that those are common people will prefer to travel to to the much cheaper big-box store (which also has more selection) for most purchases and that doesn't leave enough "I just ran out of one thing" to support a corner store.

Yet somehow, I've seen the exact same kind of suburban structure in a lot of Middle Eastern, car heavy cultures. Lots of single family villas packed together, often around a common area with a park, a medical center, an elementary school and a small shopping area adjacent to the park for small retailers and food outlets. The outlets and retailers often have a loyal customer base of people living nearby, the people enjoy the convenience of not having to take their car through a busy road just to buy groceries, and the food outlets enjoy the guaranteed patronage of visitors to the park. And these are households with multiple cars, not just 1 or 2.

For bigger purchases sure there are bigbox stores, but very few go there and buy - it's all done online with a few clicks and delivered to your home for free.

This is standard in Australia. Suburb with a block of shops... small block - choose from convenience store, cafe, hairdresser, bakery.. large block will have a supermarket of some sort

usually with parking spots because people drive.

Are toothpaste and batteries really daily necessities though? I buy toothpaste maybe once every two years in bulk, and batteries basically never, due to pretty much everything being rechargable via USB.

It's items in the collective though. (And I still use batteries although they're certainly nothing like daily necessities.) During the pandemic I really amped up my use of Amazon, etc. for deliveries and I found that I ended up getting orders delivered quicker once or twice a week than I would have ended up getting to even fairly nearby stores for.

Your dentist might want to have a talk with you if you're not using toothpaste daily.

They said they buy it in bulk. I also do. Years ago I bought a dozen reels of floss from a dental supply shop. $60 for 2km of floss. I am still using it.

Check the expiration date on that toothpaste. Fluoride usually loses effectiveness 1-2 years after purchase (depending on production date). I'd get a new tube every 12 months or less.

American zoning prohibiting shops in residential zones but allowing a drone hub just 800ft from residential buildings is a special kind of irony

When you learn more about the history of zoning - it's allll about keeping neighborhoods wealthy. Not allowing lower classes in. A lot of weird things make sense when you look at them through that lens.

American zoning in theory: we will keep noise and pollution away from homes.

American zoning in practice: the only place homes are permitted is within 50 meters of freeways.

Ha! So true.

It's fascinating, zoning in practice just has nothing to do with any of its stated goals.

> American zoning in theory: we will keep noise and pollution away from homes.

I think you misunderstood the parents comment.

The origins of zoning is to prevent the mixing of blacks and whites. It's not about noise pollution; it's about segregation.

this is misinformation -- zoning is complex; basically it appears that "if zoning was ever used to separate minority neighborhoods" then it becomes "zoning is to prevent mixing of races"

Let's be perfectly clear -- racial segregation is illegal in the USA; zoning has many implementations, many uses, many pressures and has baggage from historical situations

We're discussing the origins. The origin of zoning clearly is racial segregation. It was an explicit response to the supreme court decision that outlawed racial covenants.

The "zoning was done by the racists" along with "white flight was what destroyed the cities" is a dumb just-so narrative that the modern analogues of those people peddle so that they may distance their analogously poor sighted idea, movements, advocacy and politics from the mistakes that the

The fundamental problem is that a large part of the population feels entitled to use government to micromanage things that are better off just not managed at all.

It is none of your business what your neighbor puts on their property whether it's a homeless shelter or luxury apartment or a bodega or a fancy coffee shop. Real estate development is something market solves very well if people mind their own business and not other people's business.

That zoning was invented for racial exclusion is not hypothetical. These guys were on the record with their motivations.

The whole race thing is a distraction from the fact that the evil motivations to use the force of government to micromanage others for the most petty and frivolous of reasons (a category that "wrong skin color" would surely fall into) persist to this day.

I agree, because I hold vanilla libertarian beliefs about property rights. Unfortunately 99.12% of American libertarians are using the word to mean "selfish asshole" and as soon as you suggest that zoning is a government taking, they abandon the whole platform to defend zoning.

I'm with you, fellow .88%!

>and as soon as you suggest that zoning is a government taking

Not just zoning, but pretty much any government regulation. It boggles my mind that my state's equivalent of the EPA can just decree whatever their policy is, which has consequences on what they'll approve or won't, and this affects land values massively, and this doesn't legally get classified as a taking.

>they abandon the whole platform to defend zoning.

Which is a social problem that pretty much the entire western world suffers from these days. We don't shun, marginalize and otherwise punish people who are chronically two faced and lack principals (whatever those principals may be).

Instead of worrying about the people - make government pay for takings. It'd be a popular initiative (by which I mean capital-I Initiative, the process available in the Western states).

> It is none of your business what your neighbor puts on their property whether it's a homeless shelter or luxury apartment or a bodega or a fancy coffee shop.

I appreciate your maximalist libertarian proposition, it's a fun exercise when you have no skin in the game. But a) housing is an investment as well as a lodging (and for most people their largest investment), and the value of that investment has everything to do with what's around it. 2) community is a real thing, even when it describes a group of people outside the usual members of sympathetic "intersectionalities".

Everyone hates HOAs until they have to live next to my father, who kept three rusting "parts cars" in the driveway, piles of scrapwood in the yard, and let our dogs run all over the neighborhood.

Zoning is in the history sweet spot: Recent enough that we have well-preserved records of its origins and use. But old enough that we have had time to study the effects in practice, regardless of original intent. Widespread enough that we can know any effects were not hidden variables from local geography or politics. But not universal, so we can compare the effects over time with and without it.

That's all to say that it is well understood by people who study zoning in the US, of which there are plenty, that american racial dynamics are central in the history and use of zoning. It was not always used intentionally for segregation, but it was used for that very frequently over a long enough period of time that you can't consider it incidental to the practice.

If you look to the early 20th century you can read the discussions people were having at the time about it: letters, and op-eds, and sometimes the ordinances themselves explicitly discuss the racial justifications. At the time racial segregation was well within the national overton window, they did not have a reason to hide to hide this motivation and so they did not. Later on it gets more complicated.

I went to Disney World for a long vacation. I stayed in multiple Disney properties, just for the novelty. The cheapest "resort" (really just a large motel complex) was one experience, the most expensive a very different one.

I preferred the expensive one.

I don't hate the poors.

Except when zoning intentionally destroys the value of neighborhoods where undesirables live - how the highways were built, red lining, etc.

Neither of those were zoning. It's easy to conflate a lot of these actions together, but they are very different legal structures.

is there a book that chronicles that history accurately? interested

(I know there's been a lot written about redlining specifically, but I'm talking more broadly of the development and history of zoning.)

"The Color of Law" gets into some details, though it's not explicitly about zoning. Other books about zoning are... strangely supportive.

Here in Los Angeles we have honest to God oil derricks on public school grounds and in the middle of our neighborhoods but you can't build an apartment or open up a new corner store because of zoning.

In *some parts of Los Angeles. The city is getting better district by district, if only incrementally.

The east side of Los Angeles (Los Feliz Silver Lake, Atwater Village, Echo Park, Highland Park, Eagle Rock, Glassell Park) has managed to replace most of its neighborhood councils with YIMBY-sympathetic types that are pushing for mixed use and density along their arterials.

Not that it’s the end-all-be-all solution, but compared to the west side where I have family, it’s a breath of fresh air to see neighbors generally cautiously enthusiastic about new development rather than immediately trying to figure out how to stop it by default

I grew up in Middle America Suburbia, with big yards, cul-de-sacs and strict zoning laws. I thought it was normal that, for anything you wanted to buy, you had to get in a car and drive to it. I was told it was because of zoning laws, and it was meant to keep the neighborhood "peaceful". Well, in college I dated a girl from East LA, and she once took me to visit her family. The neighborhood had zero zoning enforcement. Every house was basically a residence and a small business - hair salons, taco shops, car repair shops, etc. It totally shocked me, like "How could people live like this?" And then we walked the neighborhood. I was shocked again how everyone knew one another so well, and all the little businesses served one another. It was a full-on bartering system, like, "Here's some fresh tortillas. Tell your Mom I'll be by next week with my daughter to do her hair for her quinceanera."

I lived my entire childhood in the same house in Suburbia, and I still don't know most of my neighbors' names. The neighborhood was "peaceful", because of zoning laws, but it was boring as shit, and most of all, I'm not so sure having to get in a car and drive just to get a box of cereal was a good thing.

To borrow a line from Marvel's Ultron: "I think you're confusing peace with quiet."

Don't get me wrong, I like my quiet suburb too. That said it's become increasingly apparent to me and I feel to society at large how incredibly atomized and alienated our society is with itself. All of us have "community" on the Internet, which is both not as good, and also is insanely catered to your individual desires and wants, and this is, frankly, unhealthy. A little social friction with people you live and work amongst is a good thing, it teaches you how to resolve conflicts, how to express difficult feelings, and how to negotiate your way through the world.

I'm reminded of the book "Life in Code" by Ellen Ullman:

“…the ideal of the internet represents the very opposite of democracy, which is a method for resolving difference in a relatively orderly manner through the mediation of unavoidable civil associations. Yet there can be no notion of resolving differences in a world where each person is entitled to get exactly what he or she wants. Here all needs and desires are equally valid and equally powerful. I’ll get mine and you’ll get yours; there is no need for compromise and discussion. I don’t have to tolerate you and you don’t have to tolerate me. No need to care for my neighbour next door when I can stay with my chosen neighbours in the ether, my email friends and the visitors to the sites I visit, people who think as I do, who want what I want. No need for messy debate and the whole rigamarole of government with all its creaky bothersome structures. There’s no need for any of this, because now that we have the World Wide Web the problem of our pursuit of happiness has been solved! We’ll each click for our individual joys, and our only dispute may come if something doesn’t get delivered on time. Would you rather be at home?”

And what is this if not the core essence of Suburbia? Tiny kingdoms for tiny kings, each answerable only unto itself, and utterly beside itself with rage any time that authority is questioned by... anything, from Neighborhood Associations to building codes to the local city.

Your quaint experience in the barrio isn't justification for having an unlicensed automotive repair business (which process hazardous waste) run out of a personal residence is a good thing.

I'm sure if that guy could move his business he would, if money and personal circumstances dictated otherwise.

Typical straw man argument

If that interests you, maybe the question "how did it get to be like this" will too. This video is pushing a point down your throat. If you can ignore that at the end it compares Canada's New London to Holland’s Utrecht: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0

Turns out the choice between "Middle America Suburbia" path and the other you describe really is a choice. Some have very deliberately chose one and some equally deliberately have chosen the other.

Like you I've nearly always lived in the "American Suburbia" style. Like you I literally didn't realise (in fact I would have scoffed at the idea) there were other choices. That was despite the fact I was taught by migrant European teachers, who, when I look back, made it very plain what they thought of the "American Suburbia" style of living. Us calmly accepting the extra overheads of longer roads, consequent travel times, power transmission, transport fuel costs, freight and so on just blew them away. It blew me away too once I understood it.

Then, again like you, I got live in one of these high density neighbourhoods for a very short while, and experienced the level of social cohesion and the "big village" feel of it.

Now I think "wtf? I've been had".

My mom is beginning to get old and now has cataracts. I wonder what happens to the Americans who can no longer drive a car due to age, disease or handicap? You're effectively stranded in this suburbia.

Independent businesses can't pay to kiss the ring in the form of all manner of local permits and hoops that must be jumped through to the benefit of various parties who otherwise have no stake in the matter.

Amazon can.

Chain stuff can.

That's a large part of why every good school district that's inevitably full of bad people winds up looking exactly the same.

You're not wrong, but it will take decades to fix American urban development, if ever at all. Today, Amazon could use the US postal service for last mile delivery, which delivers six days a week and has systems in place for large scale shippers to deliver parcels to the closest hub. The choose not to, in the same way they squeeze their fulfillment workers as hard as they can. They want to make a logistics robot that does not require humans.

Amazon will use the postal service when it's the "best" option available (decided by some supercomputer AI somewhere, probably).

What Amazon is deathly afraid of, and is a reality, is Walmart dropping stuff off at people's houses. The local Walmart provides next-day (sometimes same day if ordered early enough) free delivery of most anything non-perishabale they have in stock. Walmart already has the neighborhood warehouse, they just had to add a delivery driver or two. 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart.

That could eat Amazon up and spit it out almost overnight. They know it, too.

And the batteries and toothpaste from Walmart are almost certainly not counterfeit.

Here in Dubai, I have 2 or 3 corner stores within maybe a hundred meters of my residential tower and 9/10 purchases for groceries are through a delivery app.

“Some of the College Station residents who have complained about the noise say they still largely support the testing of drones. But many believe Amazon miscalculated by locating its depot close to so many residences.”

I agree that it seems improper to characterise these complaints as NIMBYism. The criticism is thoughtful, targeted and rises as much from Amazon’s lack of communication as from its drones’ noise.

The real question is if Amazon developers low noise drones will the people than allow them, or are they completely anti-drone.

> real question is if Amazon developers low noise drones will the people than allow them, or are they completely anti-drone

Who in the article seems anti-drone? They all seemed to go out of their way to hedge complaints.

Amazon shouldn’t have located a depot, which necessitates low flying and presumably lots of noisy acceleration, in a residential neighbourhood. They ought to have done what they did in the other examples: base out of residential-adjacent industrial areas.

There's a reason that so many airports are outside of cities, or in areas where not-so-rich people live.

Intermodals are similar. We had one that tried to set up in an area where the residents aren't so well-off, but they were able to shoot it down, anyway. People are getting better at organizing.

Almost all airports start out outside the city, even the smaller ones.

Cities grow around them.

NIMBY is a reality that has to be taken into account; but often the problems associated with it are "small enough" that money solves it - who would complain about the Amazon drone-depot behind them if Amazon was paying their property tax to have it there?

> Who in the article seems anti-drone? They all seemed to go out of their way to hedge complaints.

Dunno about them being completely anti-drone, but at least one person was worried about the drones camera:-

> A parent said their teenage daughter feared using the swimming pool because of the drone’s camera. (Amazon says it faces forward, not down).

But Amazon (and to be "fair" to Amazon, pretty much every large tech company) has had issues with data processed by their devices which the users of those devices wouldn't want handled by humans. Pretty much every smart speaker has had incidents with their reviewers being given access to voice recordings not intended for the speaker, in some cases it being recordings of kids. Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars.

So yeah, I too would be wary of what imagery drones flying over my private space would be taking. Sure Amazon says the camera(s) only point forward, but at this point I'm not surprised people trust tech companies as far as they can throw them.

EDIT: My follow up question to Amazon about the camera(s) on the drone would have been "If the camera only points forward, how does the drone determine that the drop off spot for any delivery is safe at the time of drop off without "looking" down?"

Ring (an amazon-owned company) had to pay a fine for allowing employees unfettered access to people's footage. [1] No need to "be fair" to Amazon here by pointing out other tech companies.

[1]: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/05/...

"Fair" did fell like the wrong wording, but it was the best I could articulate at the time. But yeah your right. It doesn't make Amazon any less of a scumbag just because everyone else is being just as scummy too.

> how does the drone determine that the drop off spot for any delivery is safe at the time of drop off without "looking" down?

I couldn't get the question out of my head, so I went digging, and thought I would reply to myself with the answer in case anyone was wondering.

It seems to be that the drone changes orientation by 90 degrees during travel then the orientation it uses for take off and landing. there are not only forward facing cameras, but camera mounted on the left and right sides of the drone and a camera facing backwards.

So during its "travel phase" of flight no camera is pointing at the ground, but when the drone plans to drop off a package, it rotates its orientation 90 degrees so the camera that would be facing the rear during travel would now be looking at the ground.

The prospect of having drones flying over my backyard for any reason is undesirable even if they are completely silent.

For me it depends on altitude. If they're at the height of the average Cessna, then I'm cool with it. I don't want drones buzzing 100ft above my head though.

Can either one of you elaborate why? Supposed they were absolutely silent, why would it bother you if they fly 100 feet over your backyard?

I don't like seeing them in general as an aesthetic matter. I would be disappointed if I was under a drone highway.

Same reason why I oppose mass billboards in the sky.

None of these things will ever be 100% safe, so a steady stream of one per minute as described in the article poses an actual safety risk.

I'm also not a fan of corporations having what amounts to realtime surveillance video of me any time I'm outside of my house.

The numbers I saw were about 400 feet. The bigger issue is that they aren't manned and are presumably flying at a greater frequency than conventional planes. My concern would be that they fail and fly into the side of my house at full speed. I also don't trust Amazon not to be using these drones for surveillance.

This is one of those things where knowledge makes it bad. As a personal example, having coyotes in my literal backyard on a daily basis is not something I would want. That it happens pretty much every day without me realizing it, though, shows it really shouldn't be a concern of mine. Other than making sure I have protection for any backyard chickens...

I'd be fine with Amazon drones flying over my house, as long as Amazon pays a fair usage fee. Usually it'd be pay-per-use, but for companies of their size I'm thinking of introducing monthly enterprise subscriptions. Contact my sales team for further information!

Oh, and SSO is obviously enterprise only.

That quote shows that "NIMBY" is especially proper and fitting! They support the idea in theory, but don't want it to be close to them. Like it should be in someone else's backyard.

Generally NIMBYs consider whatever they're opposing to be a real nuisance. If they don't find it a real nuisance, they don't bother. You're describing a caricature, not an actual group of people.

> You're describing a caricature, not an actual group of people.

It's a term used to describe people who find everything a "real nuisance". There are NIMBYs in my town who spent months protesting sidewalks being built in a new residential subdivision.

It's kind of inherently a caricature.

The sorts of people you're describing do certainly exist, but that isn't how unemployed urban planners on YouTube have historically used the term, which is instead used to browbeat people who (quite reasonably) don't want their neighborhoods transformed by the construction of detox facilities, halfway houses, and mass transit infrastructure.

The first two, I’m sympathetic about. You’ve gotta put them somewhere, but I get not wanting them next door.

Transit? It’s a city. Don’t live there if you don’t want people moving around nearby.

And the ones protesting every single bit of housing development on grounds it mighty change their neighborhood? Yeah, you don’t have the eternal right to keep things exactly as they were the day you moved in.

Mass transit is a non-issue in a functional society which incarcerates criminals and institutionalizes the insane. This does not describe the vast majority of major cities in North America. This is why people move to the suburbs in the first place - the inaccessibility of every service except by car is a moat that keeps undesirables from settling there. In an ideal world I would prefer mass transit to driving a car, but not in a world where every train station has an addict using drugs in it, which describes the vast majority of mass transit systems in North America today.

> And the ones protesting every single bit of housing development on grounds it mighty change their neighborhood?

If they constitute an actual majority of residents, it's their right to dictate the development of the neighborhood as they see fit.

> Yeah, you don’t have the eternal right to keep things exactly as they were the day you moved in.

This is exactly the kind of hyperbolic dismissiveness that characterizes all of these arguments.

When people go to Nextdoor to drum up opposition to a development on the basis that they have enjoyed driving by that disused refinery for a decade, maybe we shouldn't care whether they think "anything other than a disused refinery on that particular lot" is a nuisance.

NIMBY is characterized by wanting or being ok with something, just not too local to themselves. So they may be in favor of affordable housing in the city, just not in their part of the city where low income students will be going to theire kids' schools.

San Francisco is the classic example of wanting more housing, but nobody is ok with it being built near them.

To be fair to the NIMBYs, if San Francisco was completely replaced with midrise apartment buildings, or 5 over 1s or even rowhouses, it wouldn't be San Francisco anymore. It'd be something different in the same place, with the same name.

It would still be the same place and that place is called San Francisco California

Except that everything changes all the time, because time marches on. Instead of changing the buildings, we've changed the cost of living. We can no longer be a "come as you are" city, because nobody can afford it anymore, which is why all the hippies have become millionaires who cosplay being middle class, and Haight street sells overpriced tie dye instead of housing people who make tie dye in their apartments as a way to save money.

We've changed the city alright, just in exactly the way that the long-time residents were protesting against in the 1970's, except now they're receiving the rents instead of paying them.

The term NIMBY seems to have been popularized to refer to people dogmatically refusing any change, doesn't seem to apply here, where the article describes a real nuisance:

This is textbook No True Scotsman.

They're all NIMBYs to varying degrees. I'd rather have delivery drones overhead than government surveyors looking to fine people because their sheds aren't setback far enough or insurers looking to misclassify shadows on roofs as overhanging limbs and whatnot. At least I potentially get something out of it that way.

So because people oppose some specific change that is causing documented problems for them, they're automatically anti-progress? It should be incumbent on Amazon to resolve the problems their neighbors are having with their drones.

Also I don't understand what "government surveyors" have to do with anything. Do you realize that satellite images of your roofline and property are detailed enough and cheap enough that people use them for roofing estimates?

> Also I don't understand what "government surveyors" have to do with anything.

There have been a few published examples of overzealous code enforcement bureaus using drones to identify otherwise out of sight violations.

Which... I hate codes and ordinances as much as anyone, but if you're in violation you're in violation.

Better to address the overzealous part of that by forcing a more relaxed policy on the bureau through their leadership (e.g. the mayor).

Everyone's in violation. A society where everyone obeys every law is a society of robots.

Or a society in which only just laws are on the books.

Perfectly spherical cows.

Which would be fine if that's how it was but usually when this subject comes up it's because the government is being sloppy, fining first and asking questions later and rake in untold sums before they accidentally fine the guy who meticulously complied, knows he can prove it and has the time/resources to fight them and then makes the news.

There's a reason I lumped them in with insurance mis-identifying shadows and whatnot.

If the violations were truly meaningful or detrimental then the abutters would have narc'd.

That's where tying elected representation to the issue is useful.

Relatively few folks vote in local elections: blanketing the city/county with "X is responsible for Y" can sway an election.

There is nothing wrong with expressing one's concerns. Problems arise when governments allow the concerns of NIMBYs to override the greater social good, allow NIMBYs to stall the decision making process, or fail to cerify the legitimacy of the claims being made.

In a case like this, yes it is NIMBYism. On the other hand, having high frequency flights over an existing residential are, for the primary benefit of one party (i.e. Amazon) would seem to support the groundings.

> In a case like this, yes it is NIMBYism

College Station’s residents appear to fail your own test. They are prohibited by Texas law from being “allow[ed]…to override” or stall anything, and seem to have made a good case for why a drone buzzing by “every 58 seconds for 15 hours a day” is at least a legitimate grievance.

I’d also add a necessary condition to NIMBYism: it’s not in my backyard. NIMBYs want the thing. Just not near them; implicitly: near someone else. The hypocrisy animates the exasperation inherent to the term. The complaints in this article seem to be closer to not in anyone’s backyard.

I don't think this is NIMBYism. The complaints are kind of reasonable and also, allowing a private company like Amazon do this most certainly is not something for the greater good. It's just good for Amazon.

YIMBY orgs are almost entirely bankrolled by tech interests. It's absolutely in their interest to portray any opposition to any development as indistinguishable from the affluent people who don't want to improve anything (aka nimbys).

EDIT: softened wording a bit

Definition of NIMBY does not involve dogmas or opposing any change - it's just opposing a change while supporting it to happen elsewhere. It has nothing to do with the change having real or perceived negative impact on the individual. In this specific case, yes there is a real nuisance to the people - but they are happy for the testing to commence elsewhere. This is textbook definition of NIMBYism. The examples here in UK are, "Oh I love renewable energy, but I don't want to see these ugly wind turbines from my window" or "Yes please more bicycle paths, but, no they can't pass through my street".

Yeah, NIMBY means "Not In My Backyard" implying that we want that thing, just elsewhere. I don't think anyone in this situation actually wants the drones whizzing around when there is little actual benefit in the first place, and a lot of noise.

If Amazon had bothered to engage with the Texas legislature during the process, they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by having it declared an essential business function and exempt from a large number of regulations. Our legislators are remarkably business-friendly.

The term NIMBY doesn't have a "reasonable" requirement.

It's a complaint that something should not exist close to me, though I think it should exist somewhere.

Prison, power plant, waste facility, low-income housing, paper mill, railroad, etc.

The term has definitely been weaponised to a degree. Similar to "Karen" to shame people into not complaining about bad products/service

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