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Comment by binarymax | Hacker News Reader

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I see the downsides. But I also see the delivery vans in my neighborhood that are always double parking and blocking traffic. At least in the air, traffic can be routed in 3d.

There are a lot of solutions to this that involve neither vans nor drones:

1. Properly ticket and reprimand the people breaking traffic laws.

2. Properly reprimand the companies who contract out and run the vans.

3. Build cities that don't necessitate driving everywhere for everything.

4. Buy things in stores.

Just as the delivery vans participate with local police through FLOC, so will the drones, soon. Remember, if it can be seen from a public vantage point, it's not private, including what can be seen through windows and behind fences.

Solid meh from me. Only thing I really don’t like about it is it’s likely to impact the personal rights to fly drones we enjoy today (which are already being chipped away).

Otherwise, they’re probably not very loud or frequent, don’t really present much of a privacy issue vs. what street view already has, and they maybe make the roads a bit safer. Might take some jobs away from delivery van drivers. Nothing seems worth getting overly concerned for.

Probably half my immediate neighbors get an amazon delivery a day. The truck makes sometimes two or three stops throughout the day and is there for like 15-20 minutes running packages. The thought of that replaced with drone traffic is crazy. It would be like dozens of landings and overflights per hour. It is already bad enough when the realtors fly their drones overhead. I can't imagine the birds and bees aren't getting stressed out if it's managing to piss me off.

Same. Even outside the holiday season, there are 5+ package truck deliveries/day on my little street (12 houses). That's UPS, FedEx, USPS, usually multiple Amazon (which always surprises me), plus a couple unmarked vans. Plus couriers in cars. Plus food delivery, at least 2 a night. Almost all the Amazon vans are now electric Rivians or GMCs.

That's a LOT of drone traffic, given there's near zero ability to double up on a single stop as there is today.

I recently started seeing electric delivery vans from IKEA in my city. One thing I really noticed: They are whisper quiet compared to diesel trucks.

Yeah, it makes a massive difference in the neighborhood, where speeds are so low (10mph or so) there isn't much tire noise.

Now if we could just get our landscape crew (HOA, not mine personally) to adopt electric leaf blowers. I hate this time of year and the constant roar of those things.

What on earth are people buying that's delivered so frequently? I find the whole concept of frequent deliveries confusing.

who cares what they are buying. it's truly none of your business. there are people that buy things on a whim and do not even for a second think about slowing down to buy things at once to reduce the number of deliveries. if they did that, they'd forget about it and not actually purchase that whim. there could also be multiple independent people at the same address buying things in this manner.

Sounds like there’s an opportunity for bigger drones where you are. Lower frequency noise, fewer flights if you can drop more than one package per flight.

I just have a hard time seeing this becoming a major quality of life issue in the real world. It’s gonna be fine.

And birds and bees seem to be fine around waterfalls and airports, I think they’ll survive drone noise.

Annoying drone buzzing when it works, 80lb bricks from heaven when it doesn't. Not really looking forward to that future.

Share price goes up, everyone’s happy. That’s the only metric which counts.

I already get annoyed at police helicopters hovering at night. I can only imagine what dozens of different delivery services would sound like.

Stick some thin strong wire up over your back garden, and order a bunch of stuff from Amazon.

There. Now you have a whole bunch of free drone parts.

wait until people start leasing roof space as a forward operational point where a carrier drone can land, and release a swarm of last mile fullfilment drones, pick up returns, etc.

no, you're probably not the only one. bring it up at the next concerned citizens action committee meeting

Consider that drones substitute for cars and trucks driving through neighborhoods.

For the same payload delivered, ground vehicles cause significantly more property damage, environmental damage, and injuries/deaths.

That truck carries 500 packages. That drone one or two at best so to replace one truck you're looking at 100's of flights + return flights. And I'm not convinced the risks are lower.

Trucks also don't sound like a swarm of angry bees, in fact the all-electric fleet that Amazon uses around here barely sounds like anything at all. Drones would be a huge step backwards for noise pollution.

>Trucks also don't sound like a swarm of angry bees,

Heh, you've not heard my neighbors riced out car then.

Amazon vans are electric (Rivian).

A truck travels a greater distance to deliver those 500 packages to the same locations, as it must take roads instead of flying in a straight line. And roads are much more likely to have people on them than a random patch of ground. Also the truck weighs several tons. The weight requires more energy to move stuff around, and has more kinetic energy than an 80lb drone.

You should really consider how much energy it takes to levitate an 80lb drone while flying across town, compared to how much energy it takes to roll an 8000lb van across town (even ignoring the fact that the van might deliver 100 packages while making it's way across town).

An 8,000lb van will be using fossil fuels and emit particulates from tire and brake dust. Unless it was incredibly efficient and electricity for the drones was coming from coal plants, the van would emit more pollution.

But the biggest harm is people getting hit by vehicles. Delivery drones are much smaller and don't spend nearly as much time near people. Since drones can deliver stuff more quickly than large vans, they also substitute for individuals driving to a store to pick something up. So the total risk to pedestrians is even less than you might expect from eliminating many van deliveries.

I'm not so sure that the numbers will bear out what you sketch here. If we assume a drone flight per package and we scale this up to get rid of all of the delivery vehicles the number of people hit by and killed by drones will rise substantially. Drones are immature tech at best and a 5 Kg drone will put you in the morgue on impact with a greater likelihood than an accident with a delivery van. Gravity has no brakes and a drone isn't going to be able to refuse its imperative when the tech inevitably fails. I think you have to watch out not to be so 'anti' one thing that you end up with another that is as bad or even worse. Maybe the solution isn't drones and not delivery vans either.

You raise an interesting point about energy per delivery. In you example, which one is lower per package? I assume the electric truck.

Considering the distance from one delivery to the next in a van is short, and the warehouse to town distance is split via a hundred packages, it just has to be the electric van. Maybe things will make more sense if the drone can carry 20 lightweight packages. But even then you gotta wonder how much energy it takes to hover/fight gravity the entirety of the trip.

The semi truck isn't driving through my backyard recording video of me. And I doubt the economics of scale make the truck more environmentally damaging than a drone delivering a single item

In my area packages are often delivered on what looks something like an electric golf cart. It's efficient, safe, and minimally disruptive.

It's almost as if .. if noise, property damage, enviro damage, injury and death.. are the problems, then we should regulate everything that do those things equally rather than trying to pick winners among various transport modes. But among other things, this would mean holding people responsible for the incredible damage anyone can do with a car and the people will not stand for being told they cannot go vroom vroom. Additionally since we refuse to regulate until there is a crisis, anything that is new automatically has an advantage over anything that is old, regardless of which causes fewer issues per unit of work (package delivery etc).

"I don't want a noisy neighborhood, but I want to drive my two-ton death trap that you can't see toddlers in front of and I also don't want to see any of my neighbors and also I want any object in the world deliverable within 24 hours."

I chuckled when I read this post. It is well written sarcasm. I will say observing some if the "individual driver vs. X wars" on HN (usually between North Americans), there are many who think this way.

>"I don't want a noisy neighborhood, but I want to drive my two-ton death trap that you can't see toddlers in front of and I also don't want to see any of my neighbors and also I want any object in the world deliverable within 24 hours."

I live in a noisy neighborhood with commercial truck thru traffic.

I don't have any particular love for the noise or the trucks, but the kind of people who complain about noise and machines will mostly don't select to live here which is good because I find those people to be bad generally.

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