We're still moving thousands of pounds of vehicle around a public highway to carry a 1lb burrito, obviously lightweight aerial drones are the future for food and grocery delivery.
It could be a lot better if multiple deliveries are handled per trip.
We've got a long way to go on actually building out our own country in a desirable way.
And that's the point. These places are less than affordable because there's a much higher demand of people who want to live in these kinds of areas than the supply of them. We should build more!
If you live in a very walkable place, you're less likely to use delivery and when you do it's more likely to be someone on a bike or scooter. Waymo's probably don't apply there. The comparison would be walking vs delivery, and that would obviously come out bad for delivery.
If you don't live in a walkable place then the comparison is you driving vs the delivery driving, and that's a wash or even positive for delivery. The induced demand of delivery vs cooking at home (assuming you grocery shop for the week) would be very bad for delivery though.
This makes sense as a theory but it doesn't match my observed reality at all. Everyone I know who frequently orders food on delivery apps live in dense, walkable cities.
According to the written history, pre-1906 San Francisco had basically that.
It seems that the normal middle-class could afford high-quality, delicious food at restaurants, multiple times per week, due to the abundance of local ingredients and overall economic conditions.
So, how to get that quality and relative pricing today?
Excerpts from "The City That Was: A Requiem of Old San Francisco" by Will Irwin (free eBook, [0], free audiobook [1], HTML version at [2]):
> San Francisco was famous for its restaurants and cafes.
> they gave the best fare on earth, for the price, at a dollar, seventy-five cents, a half a dollar, or even fifteen cents.
> a public restaurant where there was served the best dollar dinner on earth
> The eating was usually better than the surroundings. Meals that were marvels were served in tumbledown little hotels.
> A number of causes contributed to this. The country all about produced everything that a cook needs and that in abundance—the bay was an almost untapped fishing pound, the fruit farms came up to the very edge of the town, and the surrounding country produced in abundance fine meats, game, all cereals and all vegetables.
[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3314
[1] https://librivox.org/san-francisco-before-and-after-the-earthquake-by-william-henry-irwin/
[2] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3314/pg3314-images.htmlThat's what I thought at first, after trying one inflation calculator: $30 for a decent meal, sure, and double that maybe for a pretty tasty meal, is pretty available. (Even then, I think ingredient purity and true preparation aptitude could be pretty suspect, especially at the lower end.)
BUT, TRYING AGAIN: Some inflation calculators do not go back to 1900. But looking further, $0.15 to $1.00 in 1900 would be $5.67 to $38.57 in 2025 dollars, according to https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/
I do wonder if there are discontinuities in inflation calculators for the times before the great fires in each city. Setting that aside, and assuming https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1900?amount=0.15 is accurate, 15 cents in 1900 would be $5.64 in 2025 AFAICT at the moment.
It would be very hard to find a decent sandwich for $5.67 just about anywhere in the USA, much less a multi-course, local, fresh, gourmet meal.
I think it's the general availability of these kinds of pure foods, and their accessibility all about town, prepared to near perfection, even accessible to the poor, that stands out in the Old San Francisco description. To wit:
> ...Hotel de France. This restaurant stood on California street...a big ramshackle house, which had been a mansion of the gold days. Louis, the proprietor, was a Frenchman...his accent was as thick as his peasant soups. The patrons were Frenchmen of the poorer class, or young and poor clerks and journalists who had discovered the delights...
> First ...was the soup mentioned before—thick and clean and good. Next, ...a course of fish—sole, rock cod, flounders or smelt—with a good French sauce. The third course was meat. This came on en bloc; the waiter dropped in the centre of each table a big roast or boiled joint together with a mustard pot and two big dishes of vegetables. Each guest manned the carving knife in turn and helped himself to his satisfaction. After that, ...a big bowl of excellent salad.... For beverage, there stood by each plate a perfectly cylindrical pint glass filled with new, watered claret. The meal closed with "fruit in season"—all that the guest cared to eat....the price was fifteen cents!
> If one wanted black coffee he paid five cents extra...a beer glass full of it. ...he threw in wine and charged extra for after-dinner coffee...
> Adulterated food at that price? Not a bit of it! The olive oil in the salad was pure, California product—why adulterate when he could get it so cheaply? The wine, too, was above reproach.... Every autumn, he brought tons and tons of cheap Mission grapes, ...The fruit was small, and inferior, but fresh...wished his guests would eat nothing but fruit, it came so cheap...The 2025 equivalent seems to be about $1330 per week. So in [very] round numbers it looks like about 100x.
[0] https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/03421399v4...
It looks like a normal salary for a Baker in 1900 was $2/day for a 13 hour day, or $0.15/hour[1]. a $1 meal would be about 6 hours of work in 1900.
Today, the median SF income is 100k, or $50/hr. 6 hours buys you a $300 meal.
Taxes are a whole different story you dont want me to start on. In 1900, state, local, and federal taxes were about 7% of GDP. Today they are >30%.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.li1gx2&seq=263
Anecdotally, this is consistent with what I have personally observed in dozens of countries, where the low end cost of eating out is about the same as and hour of work.
The Pima and Maricopa tribes were able to create massive agricultural surpluses from pre-Columbian times to the early 19th century thanks to the Salt River. Phoenix is not a rainforest, but it's also not a bone-dry location.
Phoenix today has plenty of water for residential and light industrial use, the problem is the persistence of agriculture. A farm in Phoenix uses something like 100x the amount of water compared to an equal amount of residential use. It was fine when there wasn't a global supply chain that could provide oranges or cotton at acceptable prices, but today the land and water have uses with much higher economic value.
What we're doing to the land and the realities of how much water the area receives today is vastly different from what was done in the early 19th century. It seems meaningless to me to point out that the area managed to easily sustain some population of people in the early 1800s when so many other fundamental things are different.
High minimum wages are making it nearly impossible to run small restaurants. We're seeing restaurant apocalypse happening in places like Seattle and Denver, because high wages result in high prices which causes lower customer volume which causes higher fixed costs per unit, which causes a death spiral. Denver, for example, has 30% fewer restaurants now, because it's so hard to run one profitably.
Lots of little tasty restaurants and high wages for service staff are basically incompatible. Many people in the city don't realize this and advocate for both.
Of course, high wages are desirable if they can be accomplished without tradeoffs, but the tradeoffs are there.
High minimum wages favor high-volume, fast service chain restaurants that are more labor efficient.
Perhaps eventually automation will relax this tradeoff, but I would expect automation to primarily benefit corporate restaurant chains over small local eateries, unless the automation is so general that any restaurant can start using it without technical expertise or R&D.
Not as much as one would think.
Rent (literal) and rent seeking (lending in this case) are the biggest drivers in food costs today.
The family restaurant in an owned building is a distant memory.
The wholesale price of food is very low at the point of production (farming) and absolutely bonkers at the retail and wholesale levels. Mostly because at every step of the chain there is debt, and massive interest payments that need to be made.
The HN set is on one side of the K shaped economy and the other half is looking very much like late stage capitalism.
Case in point: Fritos. 4.50 a bag, while the Walmart generic version is under 2 bucks. Why? Because Pepsi (owner of Fritos) is competing with apple for customers, aka SHAREHOLDERS, and has a massive amount of debt compared to Walmart. The primary input in Fritos is corn, whos price is close to 2019 levels.
To put it another way: all generic brands are cheaper than their name-brand counterparts, and that fact has nothing to do with debt or cost structures.
The real problem is affordable housing.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/anti-capit...
[1] https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/c8cfcb827e564623a6fa3...
The relative growth in housing units since 2010 has been higher than the relative growth in population and jobs, so housing price growth since 2010 can't be explained by a shortage of supply.
The issue is that the rapid pace of growth means there isn't much old stock housing on the market to provide cheaper options to homebuyers -- most of the housing on the market will be new stock for which the minimum price will be driven by the cost of construction.
I've watched one of my favorite cities housing go crazy because of many factors including investors buying up properties for airbnb, developers focusing on catering to the coming influx of higher paid amazon / oracle people, and so many betting on those future increases that everything else goes up.
Adding to that, becoming a popular place for people to buy a second (or third / fourth home) - whether it's for a temporary move, to shelter their kids going to college who have chosen here instead of Chicago, trying a lower tax place to move with remote work being easier post 2020, etc..
Good point about new construction costing more, and that in itself has many factors. and depending on exactly when things were purchased making big differences.
With the limited supply of builders, most are choosing to build more expensive places.
Sadly even if we made this place less attractive for people to move to, many of the properties wouldn't go on the market, many would just hold on to the property as a stable investment.
So population numbers are not the primary weight in the supply / demand equation in many places is something I have been learning.
The federal minimum wage in the US is pitiful and yes some cities and states do higher ones, but frankly if you’re operating on such small margins then you need to increase your prices. I’ve seen a trend of new restaurants opening with fixed menus/prices per head. They aren’t cheap, but they aren’t unreasonable, and it’s looking like at least here they are finding real footing. We’ll see in 5-10 years what the survival rate is I suppose.
During Covid I did a lot of interviews with very high-level restauranteurs (mostly chefs) in my city, several of which had James Beard awards and beyond. This is not a flex, it’s purely for context. These are considered some of the best in the city.
They all said the exact same thing: Everyone is pushing their prices too low and promising high-quality, fresh ingredients that are all locally sourced and yada yada. That’s great, but it can’t be done in a sustainable way. Not if you want to actually pay a living wage or offer even the most modest benefits to your employees. The larger population needs to accept the fact that if we want restaurants to actually survive at all, we have to pay more for it and treat it as more of a luxury.
Good, ethical, cheap. Pick two.
If you want me to acknowledge “some” isn’t enough then fine: “most states are at the minimum wage or up to $10, which is pitiful.” $1600 or less a month is pitiful. Not to mention the states with the lowest minimum wages are by and large the ones with the weakest social safety nets, so the problem is compounded. Can we move on and get back to the real point here?
Obviously, this suggestion is extremely tongue-in-cheek and would probably be absolutely awful in practice for a million reasons.
It is not the (not actually high) minimum wages. Stores I've known that had problems staying open were having to pay more than the minimum wage because housing is so expensive.
Literal landlords are just where ordinary people notice they're getting squeezed.
Too bad advances in data science has made the margin so tight that people are feeling squeezed.
Progress and Poverty (modern edition)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0058JG5TI
It was edited, abridged, and translated to modern language by Bob Drake of the Henry George School of Chicago.
As always, I recommend downloading the free Kindle sample or reading the free preview on the website before buying.
Here's an example, the first two paragraphs of the Preface in the original language:
---
THE views herein set forth were in the main briefly stated in a pamphlet entitled “Our Land and Land Policy,” published in San Francisco in 1871. I then intended, as soon as I could, to present them more fully, but the opportunity did not for a long time occur. In the meanwhile I became even more firmly convinced of their truth, and saw more completely and clearly their relations; and I also saw how many false ideas and erroneous habits of thought stood in the way of their recognition, and how necessary it was to go over the whole ground.
This I have here tried to do, as thoroughly as space would permit. It has been necessary for me to clear away before I could build up, and to write at once for those who have made no previous study of such subjects, and for those who are familiar with economic reasoning; and, so great is the scope of the argument that it has been impossible to treat with the fullness they deserve many of the questions raised. What I have most endeavored to do is to establish general principles, trusting to my readers to carry further their applications where this is needed.
---
And in the modern edition:
---
In 1871, I first published these ideas in a pamphlet entitled Our Land and Land Policy. Over time, I became even more convinced of their truth. Seeing that many misconceptions blocked their recognition, a fuller explanation seemed necessary. Still, it was impossible to answer all the questions as fully as they deserve. I have tried to establish general principles, trusting readers to extend their application.
While this book may be best appreciated by those familiar with economics, no previous study is needed to understand its argument or to judge its conclusions. I have relied upon facts of common knowledge and common observation, which readers can verify for themselves. They can also decide whether the reasoning is valid.
---
And maybe also that people don't have the means (anymore) to go to the restaurant every other day.
Restaurants closing due to wage increases means workers were being exploited to cover unsustainable costs. Rents have to come down or wages need to go up across the board to cover the higher prices.
The billionaire class can’t eat enough food to keep restaurants open. They need to outsource it to the middle class.
The main solution is to increase economic freedom and reduce regulatory burdens. Allow people to build. Too often they are prevented by restrictive zoning laws, absurd environmental reviews, everything-bagel mandates for diverse contractors, etc. Ironically, big corporations and billionaires often love regulation because it raises the barrier to entry and reduces competition.
I don't believe that any human being is "only worth" $10/hr, or whatever arbitrary level you set.
Every human being deserves to have the resources to live. And to a first approximation, every human being is capable of doing enough work to be worth that. (The exceptions are people with various kinds of disabilities, whom we should be caring for, without question or reservation, and providing accommodations for those who can work, if they aren't just expected to Not Be Disabled.)
If a job wants to create a position to do [thing], but [thing] will only bring in, say, $5/hr worth of profit...then the job simply shouldn't create that position as-is. Either the owner needs to do it themselves, or they need to find a way to change what the job does so that it makes them enough money to cover labor costs.
One potential solution is for government to subsidize their wages through mechanisms like the Earned Income Tax Credit. That helps low-skill workers to gain some experience and move up the ladder without artificially distorting the labor market.
The only ones that I believe this can genuinely be true of are people with various types of disabilities. Which I addressed in my post.
The idea that there's this large percentage of fully able-bodied workers who are completely incapable of ever being trained to do any kind of skilled work doesn't pass the smell test. At best, it reeks of various racist/eugenicist ideas.
Some of those workers can be trained to be more valuable. But employers generally aren't going to hire them based on hope.
>Every human being deserves to have the resources to live.
That's true.
>I don't believe that any human being is "only worth" $10/hr, or whatever arbitrary level you set.
Then you haven't seen much of the world
I absolutely agree that some of the regulations are bad, and in general building more is the main solution to these problems. Zoning and parking space requirements are especially egregious in the USA.
The example in this thread, of "co-locating" everyday commercial with residential, is another part of the solution. I can move further away from the city if the daily necessities are easier to reach. This would also help with traffic, which would then help people needing to commute.
Another way of putting this:
"Small restaurants can only operate at a profit if they're allowed to pay people so little they can't afford to live off of it."
Any business that can only survive by exploiting its workers does not deserve to exist.
The fact that there were many small restaurants that were operating just fine when the minimum wage was, relatively speaking, much higher (ie, you could work full-time waiting tables at minimum wage and still afford a house and kids) strongly suggests that this claim does not hold water.
In most cases if you attach 50 grand worth of stuff to a building and can't pay your rent one month you may be legally required to leave most of your equipment with the landlord, and could be required to pay for additional construction.
Many landlords require certain insurances you can bypass with your truck. The public can't sue the building owner for things.
Inspections are also easier to handle with smaller places to tidy up, and everyone in your restaurant can see an inspector coming before they get inside.
Also if you get a bad inspection or bad reviews, just put a new wrap on your truck and it's not like a bad reputation for a specific building is set in.
The cheapest way to eat is to buy ingredients and cook it yourself.
Restaurants buy ingredients, and cook, but also have to add costs like rent and labor. Thus as money supply constricts businesses like restaurants see a slow down in customers.
The current economic policies in the US are explicitly designed to raise the prices of goods and services like health care. This will, as a first order effect, reduce the disposable cash available.
Restaurants will suffer first, they are a luxury easily and quickly discarded. But they are the canary. Expect to see all kinds of businesses, especially small businesses suffer, as these policies play out.
And just remember, you voted for this, and many people explicitly support these policies and their effects. These are not bugs, they are explicit design goals.
No...definitely did not vote for this, maybe you did? I voted against this in every way, and see how that worked out. Democracy is grand.
So sure, I'm not saying 100% of people voted for this. The "you" in this context is 2nd person plural; the collective "you".
As you note, democracy is the will of the majority imposed on the minority. Personally I'm not convinced that's a great approach, but I'm also not a fan of minority rule either. Ultimately I guess, whenever there are choices to be made, someone's not going to like the outcomes.
I sympathize with your current plight. Welcome to the minority. My only approach at this point is to keep reminding people that they chose this, that their vote matters. Perhaps when people understand that causal link then they'll make better choices in their own interest. (Whom I kidding right?)
Drone deliveries are a lot more like social media, hotels or flights, and a lot less like traditional deliveries. Once you build out the infrastructure, your cost-per-delivery (OpEx) rounds to zero. You want to spread out your infrastructure costs across as many deliveries as possible, so it makes sense to increase utilization, even at extremely low delivery prices. This is the "Ryanair model."
Because drone deliveries are so cheap (and so fast, there's no traffic after all), long-range deliveries make much more sense. If you can do long-range, you care a lot less about where your restaurant is located and how many customers you have passing by. This makes your rent go down.
Long range also increases how many customers you can realistically serve. You can exploit this in two ways, either by hyperspecializing in some particular kind of food, or by introducing standardization and automation.
A large part of the reason why restaurants aren't automated is that they just don't have that many customers. It doesn't make sense to pay for expensive machines (or even design them) if you are constrained by both rent and range. If neither are a constraint, you can go wild.
No air traffic until their are drone deliveries. What will the sky look like when you take every _individual_ package from Door Dash, Uber Eats, Postmates, Instacart, Amazon, UPS, Fedex, DHL, etc etc etc and put them on _individual_ drones? Even if the logistics could be sorted out, I worry about the quality of life issues it poses for communities, especially with the amount of noise drones make.
NYC handles 3,000 flights a day; it handles 2,300,000 package deliveries a day.
The idea that costs should be "what the market will bear" is a cancer in economic thinking, as it encourages testing the waters to see how high one can raise their prices, without increasing wages in tandem to ensure there are still the maximum number of potential customers (if you price me out of purchasing your product, I am no longer a potential customer, and the size of non-customers is rising in almost all fields that aren't B2B)
There's a certain minimum number of foods you need to sell each day which directly controls how many restaurants you can have in a given area.
The real solution is burrito tubes: https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...
We have a ton of these food trucks all over Austin. Most of them ... just aren't very good. So, apparently, regulations aren't too onerous.
And a food truck isn't exempt from the fact that ridiculous commercial real estate prices cause people to be too spread out to be able to service in walking range.
And the regulations got tighter because these trucks were blowing up and killing people. I haven't heard about one exploding in a while, so apparently the regulations had an effect.
I see taco trucks everywhere and there are dozens of food carts within a mile of me.
This sounds more like issue that is specific to your area and local government.
I know people whose cooking is "good enough" for themselves, but suspect enough from my point of view that I now decline any invitations for dinner where they're cooking.
If not, what makes cooking special?
There are many reasons people eat out beside lack of cooking knowledge or desire to be social. You seem like you value feeling superior to these people. Perhaps you can find a way to value yourself without looking down on everyone who makes different choices?
> Plus it is cheaper, faster, healthier and tastier than eating out.
You can get some of those 4 but in my experience, getting all 4 at the same time doesn't happen often.
Eehhh.. I'm a decent cook, I can adjust things for my taste but there's no way I can compete with people who do this for 40h/week over multiple years with kitchen appliances worth as much as a decent second hand car. Hell, good restaurants have access to produce I can't really get since I'm not going to tour 4 farms to make 1-4 portions of food.
I have a small strip mall type shopping center with a grocery store a 2 block walk away. Brewpub, taqueria, pizza joint, grocery store, starbucks, UPS store, wine bar, fitness studio, yoga place, etc. Plus there's a post office another block away. Hell, yesterday I walked the 2mi roundtrip to the local Stanford medical outpost to have my blood draw done.
In San Francisco, local neighbourhoods discussed whether or not two ice-cream stores in the neighbourhood were too many ice-cream stores or not. If you don't want these people to have a voice you can have what you want, but if you're against the disenfranchisement of people then you have to accept that others have different tastes from you.
In what way do walkable neighborhoods not pass environmental review?
> but if you're against the disenfranchisement of people.
Nobody is taking away their right to vote, so it isn't "disenfranchising" someone to put in a second icecream shop in their neighborhood when they only wanted one.
> San Francisco, local neighbourhoods discussed whether or not two ice-cream stores in the neighbourhood were too many ice-cream stores
SF seems to have a public feedback and planning problem that dysfunctionally favors nimbyism over regional needs and they end up shooting themselves in the foot with it over and over.
> In what way do walkable neighborhoods not pass environmental review?
Try it and you’ll find out.
In another comment you claim that environmentalists are usually pro sprawl. That...very much does not match my experience. How did you form this opinion?
Most serious environmentalists I know support urban densification, not sprawl because densification increases efficiency, decreases polution and decreases habitat destruction.
So yes, mostly the NIMBY shit you refer to. Though apparently the other chap lives in a place where they managed to solve that so we will see soon enough how they did when he says where.
In a similar vein, widespread full-autonomous driving cars will likely lead to more people taking longer commutes by commoditizing the cost of a ride and freeing up the time that would otherwise be spent driving.
I personally really support autonomous cars for safety reasons, and to hopefully reduce car ownership, but the definitely didn't solve traffic or the external costs of cars. I hope there's an indirect path from then towards increased public transit.
its more effecient and its not even question
What convinces you that it weren't the case?
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/85/Ya...
They could also use bicycle lanes, but cyclists won't like it.
But you can't make things obscenely large in the beginning since then if the area doesn't take off you have a huge amount of infrastructure that still needs maintenance and it also feels like a ghost town with less usage.
It was all a lot easier in the 20th century because there wasn't this mix of speed/capability. The cars were shit, horse carriages aren't exactly fast, bicycles were shit... You had | 20hp trabantesque cars - 5hp horse carriage - bicycle - pedestrian |. Now you have | 400 hp cars - faster (e)bicycles - pedestrians | combined with increased safety culture so you need more splittage and more barriers (be it trees, an actual barrier, curvy roads built to slow people down, etc)
Maybe they won't ever become a "big thing", but Zipline is already delivering food directly to consumers in TX and elsewhere.
There's a lot of empirical evidence that people will chose bikes over cars if the infrastructure made it safe and convenient, even with terrible weather. Paris, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam come to mind, but there are many more examples.
Very much treating the symptoms rather than the root problems.
(City center properties don't have drone drop/landing areas.)
(The couriers here use e-bikes and similar light vehicles as they can navigate quicker in the traffic.)
Companies could even share busses. Or delivery companies like door dash could switch to the collective bus model and turn thier drivers into bus drivers.
I need to be able to just walk outside and flag down the burrito man, just like you would for an ice creme truck
Beyond quality issues it'd just lead to a massive amount of food waste too. In order to always have the order available you'd have to stock everything in excess of demand and food only holds for so long before it has to be disposed of for safety reasons.
Some interest in reducing evasive maneuvers or counter-attacks triggered by noise.
People should be given enough time to make and eat healthy food, or dine-in at a restaurant if they want to eat restaurant food.
Boxed up food tastes bad, and is largely a solution for overworking people.
you've overlooked the trebuchet !
Use a catapult/trebuchet/cannon to launch the drone as close as possible to the target area - maybe use a discardable biodegradable sheath to improve aerodynamics. At the optimal distance and height, switch the drone from ballistic to powered mode and complete the delivery. Maybe increases payload (the drone doesn’t have to take off carrying the payload). And definitely increases range, as we are not having to use onboard power for flight for part of the laden delivery, so there is more energy available for the unladen return trip.
Personally I would love to see cannon launches but most localities are unlikely to approve (maybe Texas?)
Remember, food ingredients and people move around in large multi-ton vehicles as well. If you think people going from A-B is OK, then food going from B-A should be similarly OK.
Infact, once you can pool together food, then the equation flips and favors food moving from B-A, rather than many people taking different paths from A-B
It's honestly a miracle onto God that everyone isn't just constantly trying to kill themselves.
Seems she would be better off in a care facility...
https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...
Of course my drone is for FPV fun, delivery drone would be far less efficient.
Either way cost of power negligible here.
[0] https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showpost.php?s=11f6090a0c478...
make the {approved, licensed} burrito for you at home
High tech is not the answer to everything.
Looking at the bicyclists "texting while biking" i think the delivery wouldn't be the only market for an autonomous bicycles.
Sidenote: heard that Tesla added an "aggressive mode" to its FSD in which it would drive at higher speeds and would make more aggressive maneuvers. I suppose it isn't just Tesla as after more than decade of docile behavior of Waymo cars i've been recently aggressively cut by a Waymo, and few weeks before that a Waymo car asserted it's well out-of-normal left turn trajectory forcing us to give it way to avoid being barreled by it. Interesting whether such an aggressive autonomous driving would shorten the burrito delivery time.
cheap enough to deployed in the thousands. small enough to take up less than 1 sq / ft of sidewalk space.
Meanwhile, driverless taxis should normally be lightweight two seaters.
https://www.costco.ca/wike-premium-suspension-bike-trailer--...
It's because everything is really far and we design our cities to burn as much land as humanly possible.
One side effect of that is that bikes are inconvenient. Another is that nobody can afford housing and starving homeless people are harassing you for money.
Postmates - How we built a Burrito Cannon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br_KqzLWunM
Burrito Cannon Demo
[0] https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...
* No refunds on orders damaged en route by SAM, or delivery mechanism malfunction. Customer waives their right to any claims for compensation for property damage, injury or loss of life due to elevated delivery velocity.
Why have installations or stores at all? Just have a self driving and self making burrito trucks. You order one up, and on the way to you, it's being made in the back. Little hatch on the side, shoots out onto your doorstep or through your window.
Then, of course, you've now got an arms race of self making burrito trucks roaming about. Chipotle has one, Taco bell too. And, of course, if a Taco Bell truck knows that a Chipotle truck is next to it on the freeway, well, I mean, there's no one inside it of course. How could you prove that those nails came out of the bottom of the truck anyways?
Pretty soon, we've got burrito trucks duking it out, battle bots style, on the freeways and streets. And then you gotta deploy countermeasures, armor, etc. Just to get your burrito to you. Order up two from different companies and you've got dinner and a show.
And, honestly, is this not the future we all really want? Giant junk food filled mech-cars blasting each other at high speeds from the comfort of our couches.
Didn't work out, last I checked.
(Edited a bunch of times for doofusness.)
They have not implemented the Mad Max style of vehicular combat you described, yet.
What's better than a Factory?
A FactoryFactory!
Why order a burrito that is made in a truck, when you can order a BurritoFactory that is constructed en route to you, to your exact specifications, and from then on, will make you endless burritos from the comfort of your own home?!?
https://www.core77.com/posts/137981/The-Amazon-Delivery-Miss...
I can’t wait to get a push alert and then go over, open the window, and open my mouth.
This is the true long term.