Pros, Cons, And Why Aren't They Everywhere Already?
Delivery drones have been talked about for over a decade. Not just flying buzzsaw-o-death type drones but also cutesie-wutesie little wheeled boxes with smiley faces painted on them, and autonomous trucks. They all still fail sometimes. (BTW: This isn't what aerial delivery drones are like - that video has to be a setup for the lulz.)
But also, they are doing vital jobs already, and aside from dashing drug delivery drones, the largest slice of the delivery drone market will be food. (I bet you thought I was going to say "pizza," didn't you?)But there are going to be pros and cons, supporters and detractors. I'm hoping I can take a balanced look at some of the most obvious factors in the equation.
The players:
Companies like Wing, Amazon Prime Delivery, and hundreds of food and parcel delivery companies would like to make those last-half-mile deliveries without the expense of courier delivery.
People like you and me whose places will be overflown by drones - and which are for the time being flown by human operators - are going to complain about privacy.
People who are going to be sharing roads and footpaths with cutesie-wutesie little wheeled boxes with smiley faces painted on them will take a while to get used to the idea that you have to share.
The relevant airspace and town planning and maintenance bodies don't really want to have to make arrangements to share that space among all the contenders somehow, they don't want or need another raft of changes to the rules to account for public safety.
A new crop of drone-based aerial taxi services that want the same airspace that the drones want to operate in. These types of aerial vehicles will be carrying lives, not just dinners.
And then there are millions of people who want their goods delivered ASAP and who will otherwise have to use a delivery service which uses large vehicles and drivers to do so, or else have to drive to the place themselves, creating road traffic and congestion around peak delivery times.
The basic pros and cons:
Ground and aerial delivery drones are a way to get products to the consumer. At the moment aerial drones require an operator, and require that operator to have Visual Line Of Sight over the route from pickup to delivery. They may not rely solely on FPV video cameras on the drone. Rules may change in the future, to allow the operator to fly by video.
Either way, the drones already have cameras mounted so they in effect can see everything along the route, and so can the operators.That includes backyards rooftops swimming pools and fields and yards along the route. Therefore there's a privacy issue.
The rules also may change to allow autonomous drone deliveries. (Cutesie-wutesie little wheeled boxes with smiley faces painted on them already drive some routes autonomously but they do. . . have - some - issues, as the videos show.) Aerial drones seem to still have a ways to go but - as the article mentions - there has been a huge shift in the use of AI to allow drones to change their routes to avoid collisions and bottlenecks so we may well see this tech both rolled out to both kinds of drones, and also legal to operate.
There will still have to be video retained for a certain length of time in case of incidents and disputes though and that video will still be accessible to human operators so the privacy issues still remain. The use of drones will lead to smol cute drone congestion on the ground and in the air, but also reduce the need for delivery trucks and vans and the resulting much larger problems of pollution and just the fact that larger vehicles are deadlier than the cute kind.
Small delivery drones are also more flexible. Instead of having to operate a scheduled route with fixed stops along the way - and some out of the way places - being very difficult to reach by conventional means - wouldn't have been able to be serviced by couriers at all. With small drones ALL endpoints can be covered with equal service levels, including (in Wing's case) small hospitals all over the country.
The airspace above urban and suburban zones would become very crowded. Therefore drones would have to have AI that absolutely enforces avoidance of all other traffic including other drones.
Push and shove:
There are so many views about this.
"Let the lazy so-n-sos go get their stuff from the shop!" vs "What? And drive there from sixteen rings of suburbs out, crowd roads and cause pollution?" There's something to be said for either point of view. If there's a good food outlet within a few blocks of home I prefer to walk there despite my mobility issues.
But if the weather's bad or my back's bad or it's too far away, forget it, I'm either driving there guiltily or getting it delivered, depending on my state of finances. And besides we both prefer home-cooked from-scratch meals. But then if I could get my groceries delivered without breaking the bank - hmmm...
And then again there's also choosing the ingredients - harder vegetables for a stew, slightly softer for a soup, and ripe for stir-fry or an omelette - and so, often a personal visit seems better. You get the idea though - if a good F&V was close enough for me to bike or walk it, I'd prefer that to delivery or going there by car.
Then too there are going to be, as I said, people who want to move up into the air around cities using small personal aerial transports. To clear traffic congestion, this makes perfect sense. But - see last few paragraphs of this section - cities are likely to change drastically in the next few years and make such transport seem silly.
There is going to be an inevitable push&shove over the use of roads for self-driving traffic of all sorts vs larger ICEVs and transports bringing goods and food into cities. Once again, there will be changes that fix that.
Currently, cities cluster around the Central Business Districts and Industrial Districts, with IDs usually being the entry and exit points, for goods and food both incoming and being manufactured and being exported.
But again, see these Last Few Paragraphs:
The Last Few Paragraphs
Or the inevitable competition for public space. However you look at it, the CBD with half a million office workers commuting in and out has suffered a fatal blow from the work from home moves recently.
Hopefully this will lead to some sanity in the way Zone planning currently is, and allow low, medium, and high density housing to share the Zone, along with retail and restaurant premises, that will take away some of the need for instant delivery anyway.
The payoffs:
A return to walkable living seems to be making the news, and it would mean far less vehicular traffic would be needed in cities. Combined with more efficient and clean public transport, that would take pressure off roads and remove the need for thousands of acres of car parking in CBDs and suburbs where currently millions of cars spend 90% of their lives.
If you add to that perhaps underground routes for delivery drones and larger scale automated logistics so that the surface remains clear and the transports are electric and standardised, you've created so much aboveground space that can be used for other purposes.
Everything from inexpensive small living spaces to parks and public facilities, and the aboveground will hardly ever see a vehicle that isn't electric, publicly owned and operated, or a delivery drone. Also, let's face this, energy will become VERY cheap or even free.
It would be cheaper to create small living spaces for homeless people that are complete with climate control, lighting, and cooking facilities, than to have to destroy cityscapes with antipersonnel benches and sleep prevention studs and have the constant threat to those people's lives.
If you clearly separate manufacturing and stevedoring areas from the city, you have a situation where ONLY public transport and logistics need to enter and exit those areas. Large intrastate and interstate infrastructure will terminate in those zones, leading to most of the remaining ICEV transport not polluting the cities.
The drones (now encompassing everything from passenger trains to cargo trains to people movers to the tiniest drone) will move much more efficiently along fewer roads and subways, and anyone with a self-driving EV will be able to take advantage of the logistics scheduling and control system to move around.
But the urgent need to own a private EV will be reduced. If you can walk to anything you need daily, and anything else can be brought to you in less time than it would take you to find parking, and you could lease a vehicle for days/weeks/months for almost nothing when you wanted to road trip, why would you want to take up your driveway space and have all the maintenance bills?
If you could walk out your front door and find a public transport vehicle already waiting for you, you get on and it takes you trouble-free and twice as fast as you'd be driving yourself, you get out at the manufacturing facility and do your four hour shift then just step outside and get another ride already waiting for you to take you to the gym or a nature hike afternoon where it patiently waits for you to take you home again and it's all included in your work conditions and salary then why wouldn't you want to have all that?
I don't think these changes are decades away. Many local authorities are already aware of them, and making changes or planning for such changes. I think you'll start seeing these start to happen now, and in a year to five years, imperceptibly at first and then snowballing.
It'll create jobs re-structuring urban/suburban areas, it'll create more jobs manufacturing and maintaining the new transport systems, managing imports and exports to the locality, and more.
The energy companies that are at the moment fully exploiting their status as sole energy providers will find themselves increasingly sidelined and irrelevant as small-scale energy grids coalesce and set their own prices, making the present exploitative prices painfully obvious, and all of these things will together turn cities from carbon wellsprings to firstly neutral and later carbon sinks as they manage their mini-ecosystems better and better.
The fightbacks:
We currently have some very "well-connected" people in urban planning and management who are also not willing to change things that they've made a living from promulgating. But public opinion is shifting, public pressure is mounting.
Large corporations will feel their way of existing is being threatened and try and act to prevent many of these changes. In fact, they're doing it now:
Legislating to prevent unmanned autonomous drone deliveries to protect their logistics chains.
Fighting tooth and nail as they are to prevent legislation that will make ICEVs irrelevant compared to EVs and H2Vs.
Stirring up public sentiment against wind and solar power, against battery storage, gravity storage, and new alternatives being taken up.
Resisting to the last, the concession that they should take back all the plastics they produce and recycle that (at some tiny cost to their much-vaunted "bottom line") it rather than make new plastics, resisting legislation that will require them to repair ecological damage their greed has created.
Resisting to the last that their focus needs to change from digging resources out of the ground and instead recycling what they've already littered aboveground with.
My Advice:
Resist.
Apply pressure, ask everyone you know to apply pressure, to tell your government to change those things.
Make it public knowledge among your friends. Tell them, send them to articles like this one, get them to start becoming activists too. Activism doesn't have to mean hurling stones in the street, good general pressure and showing others this way of doing things achieves just as much.
Take a look around you. It's too late to stop what's already happened but it's not too late to stop the next bit of pollution, the next bit of graft and corruption, the next environmental disaster.
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