Drone Delivery is a Terrible Idea!
Everyone (??) is so excited about drones delivering our packages. Imagine that: I click the drone delivery option on Amazon and 30 minutes later, “ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!!” a drone is hovering outside my front door, a package descending to my QR-code-marked landing zone. Hot coffee from Starbucks, minutes after I order it! A pair of burritos-grande, with no poor DoorDash guy running them out to me. What a terrible, terrible idea! But some say it is coming, inevitably…
Why is it such a terrible idea? First of all, because drones are noisy AF. An annoying, whiny noise. A poor Australia bloke in Logan, Queensland, where drone deliveries have commenced, bemoans, “”I’m getting buzzed by these things 5–10 times an hour, every hour, of every day of my life … The soundtrack of my existence is now these drones just whizzing past my place…” The article goes on to let Wing brag that they have already reduced the noise by half. But a drone that is half as noisy is still a damn noisy drone!
Now, image that, instead of getting buzzed 5–10 times an hour, the buzzing is continuous, all day long and well into the night. Yikes! Insomnia, anyone?
Of course the truth is that the solution does not scale. How many millions of deliveries are made every day? How many drones would fill the skies? I am always tickled when I watch a futuristic science fiction movie and it shows an occassional drone or two gliding (silently) through the city. Shouldn’t it show drone swarms like murmurations of starlings?
Moreover, if we let this happen, we are repeating the grevious mistake we made when General Motors bought up and tore out thousands of miles of trolley tracks so people would be forced to use autmobiles instead. And when Ike built the interstate highway system instead of passenger trains. Individual transportation pods are vastly inefficient in cost, energy, and space utilisation, compared to public transportation. And now we want to have individual transportation pods for each of our purchases, filling our skies? It is insane. It is a terrible idea.
