I personally feel it is NIMBY. They actually provide a useful service. They would like NOT to have clusterfucks because they are dangerous to their operations. The noise level is much improved in this design. I think an honest shot is worth it.
And it isn't a useful service, IMO. It's another attempt to sell something that's currently shared (air-space, silence), while not offering benefits in a city. In remote areas, it could offer something, but I'm sure the big bucks are to be found in densely populated areas.
> It's another attempt to sell something that's currently shared (air-space, silence)
Silence isn't part of the tradeoff, since delivery trucks and vans are much louder. And I prefer giving up airspace to deliveries, since my kids aren't playing in the airspace.
Yeah... people pay for it... because it's useful. That's usually how money works. I am kind of irked by this pervasive cynicism on HN where whenever some guys want to build something, the crowd goes "boooo, you're stealing from us!! This won't work!!! There will be some cost and we're not willing to pay anything!! "
There is a new externality that they're not paying for. I don't care if other people pay for it, I want to be reimbursed for the externality it causes me.
Usually it doesn't replace car traffic, it just allows more traffic from other sources of traffic, adding lanes to roads supports this, humans will fill the vacuum with something else. laws of efficiency demand it.
I don't think so. These would be a disaster for birdlife in any city. Not to mention privacy and the fact that many places have extensive no drone fly zones already for essentially these reasons.
Hard to say without seeing what it looks like in real life. In principle it seems like it could replace delivery vehicles on the road and those delivery robots on the sidewalk, which could be a net benefit. In practice I imagine we'll just get the worst of all three.
Trying to get your wheelchair across the street when there's an Amazon van with its blinkers on blocking the curb cut on one side and two delivery robots in a stalemate in the other curb cut, above you a delivery drone gets confused by GPS signals bouncing off the skyscrapers and crashes into a freshly cleaned window, falling to the street beside you. Two thirds of this story is already happening, we'll have to see what new excitements drones can add to the mix.
Just want to quickly point out how much of a lifesaver delivery services are for many disabled folks. As someone who is disabled I find it very strange how critical abled people are of these technologies, even going so far as to use our situations in arguments against it without actually getting our opinion on it.
I'd expect the economics to work better the sparser the region. In Manhattan you can just send out someone on a bike, in the endless suburbia called Los Angeles it starts making sense, but I imagine this really shines if you want a Starbucks in a town that doesn't have a Starbucks.
I can't imagine the kind of clusterfuck these would cause in a sufficiently dense city. The sky blotted with these...