Amazon’s delivery drones are grounded in College Station, Texas

I grew up in Middle America Suburbia, with big yards, cul-de-sacs and strict zoning laws. I thought it was normal that, for anything you wanted to buy, you had to get in a car and drive to it. I was told it was because of zoning laws, and it was meant to keep the neighborhood "peaceful". Well, in college I dated a girl from East LA, and she once took me to visit her family. The neighborhood had zero zoning enforcement. Every house was basically a residence and a small business - hair salons, taco shops, car repair shops, etc. It totally shocked me, like "How could people live like this?" And then we walked the neighborhood. I was shocked again how everyone knew one another so well, and all the little businesses served one another. It was a full-on bartering system, like, "Here's some fresh tortillas. Tell your Mom I'll be by next week with my daughter to do her hair for her quinceanera."

I lived my entire childhood in the same house in Suburbia, and I still don't know most of my neighbors' names. The neighborhood was "peaceful", because of zoning laws, but it was boring as shit, and most of all, I'm not so sure having to get in a car and drive just to get a box of cereal was a good thing.

Here in Los Angeles we have honest to God oil derricks on public school grounds and in the middle of our neighborhoods but you can't build an apartment or open up a new corner store because of zoning.

When you learn more about the history of zoning - it's allll about keeping neighborhoods wealthy. Not allowing lower classes in. A lot of weird things make sense when you look at them through that lens.

Independent businesses can't pay to kiss the ring in the form of all manner of local permits and hoops that must be jumped through to the benefit of various parties who otherwise have no stake in the matter.

Amazon can.

Chain stuff can.

That's a large part of why every good school district that's inevitably full of bad people winds up looking exactly the same.

People go on walks or bike in their neighborhood all the time. A suburban neighborhood could absolutely support a corner store with a handful of parking spots. We just don't allow for the experiment to even happen due to zoning regulations.

Suburbs used to be built with convenient access to businesses until 1946. They aren't mutually exclusive features of a pleasant neighborhood. Most American's have never experienced a well functioning old suburb and don't realize the scale of the hellscapes they are really living in.

If suburbs are truly people's preference then we shouldn't need laws to mandate their existence

I can think of multiple “corner stores” that are the only business within a single-family home residential area within a few minutes drive of the house I grew up in in suburban NY. I’m pretty sure they all got grandfathered in and would not be permitted as new construction with the zoning, but they’ve all been in business since before I was born and are still going. These are mostly neighborhoods without sidewalks, and the stores have parking for only a handful of cars.

You’re right that “most” houses can’t be within walking distance of a corner store outside cities, but my anecdata experience is those residential communities can definitely support those businesses. They might require a short drive, but they’re still a lot closer than the shopping center, and a mix of “ran out of one thing”, deli/breakfast sandwiches, and beer keeps them in business.

They can only afford to live in those single family houses in the suburbs because they don't have to pay the full cost of the infrastructure to run miles and miles all the way out to their house. It's being subsidized by the taxes paid by folks in the inner cities.

What you say is likely true. I've seen even crazier developments though. Not super far from me is a giant development of 3-4 story apartment buildings. It's easily a mile long and 1000ft wide. Just identical mid-rise buildings but not a single store, cafe or restaurant. It's truly the worst of both worlds. No privacy and space and zero walkability. Even by car the next decent grocery store is 5 minutes away.

The reality of many countries show that people are not averse to local shopping. They only become so if there are no really good options to use a car and drive a few miles to buy a single toothpaste.

Well, it's also possible that delivery drones at scale maybe just have an unavoidable noise pollution factor. Sure, roads do too but those are pretty much a given even in areas with density that supports good public transit--and maybe especially if--see e.g. Manhattan. (And it's not like trains don't cause noise pollution too.)

Aside from the odd military helicopter from a nearby training area, I have pretty much zero audible air traffic at my house. I would very much object to large drones overhead on a regular basis.

It isn’t efficient when you factor in the cost of such small deliveries.

Also having some form of slack in the system goes a very long way in making the system resilient, especially in a system where your provider’s interests are not aligned with yours.

It's items in the collective though. (And I still use batteries although they're certainly nothing like daily necessities.) During the pandemic I really amped up my use of Amazon, etc. for deliveries and I found that I ended up getting orders delivered quicker once or twice a week than I would have ended up getting to even fairly nearby stores for.

Check the expiration date on that toothpaste. Fluoride usually loses effectiveness 1-2 years after purchase (depending on production date). I'd get a new tube every 12 months or less.

Your dentist might want to have a talk with you if you're not using toothpaste daily.

In Europe there's a good chance the 'corner shop' is run by a national business or franchise, benefitting from their supply and logistics systems.

That means prices are usually the same as in their larger stores, although the cheapest (low margin) brands might not be stocked in the smaller ones.

I would never consider buying toothpaste or normal batteries online. What a hassle! Just take the packet off the shelf in the small supermarket that's at the end of my street, or the one by the station, or the one near the station by work, on the one just the other side of work.

This is one supermarket chain in Denmark, and you'll note I haven't centred the map on the middle of Copenhagen but the suburbs: https://www.google.com/maps/search/Netto/@55.736038,12.46374...

Amazon will use the postal service when it's the "best" option available (decided by some supercomputer AI somewhere, probably).

What Amazon is deathly afraid of, and is a reality, is Walmart dropping stuff off at people's houses. The local Walmart provides next-day (sometimes same day if ordered early enough) free delivery of most anything non-perishabale they have in stock. Walmart already has the neighborhood warehouse, they just had to add a delivery driver or two. 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart.

That could eat Amazon up and spit it out almost overnight. They know it, too.

And the batteries and toothpaste from Walmart are almost certainly not counterfeit.

The prospect of having drones flying over my backyard for any reason is undesirable even if they are completely silent.

I'd be fine with Amazon drones flying over my house, as long as Amazon pays a fair usage fee. Usually it'd be pay-per-use, but for companies of their size I'm thinking of introducing monthly enterprise subscriptions. Contact my sales team for further information!

Oh, and SSO is obviously enterprise only.

> real question is if Amazon developers low noise drones will the people than allow them, or are they completely anti-drone

Who in the article seems anti-drone? They all seemed to go out of their way to hedge complaints.

Amazon shouldn’t have located a depot, which necessitates low flying and presumably lots of noisy acceleration, in a residential neighbourhood. They ought to have done what they did in the other examples: base out of residential-adjacent industrial areas.

The sorts of people you're describing do certainly exist, but that isn't how unemployed urban planners on YouTube have historically used the term, which is instead used to browbeat people who (quite reasonably) don't want their neighborhoods transformed by the construction of detox facilities, halfway houses, and mass transit infrastructure.

To be fair to the NIMBYs, if San Francisco was completely replaced with midrise apartment buildings, or 5 over 1s or even rowhouses, it wouldn't be San Francisco anymore. It'd be something different in the same place, with the same name.

> Also I don't understand what "government surveyors" have to do with anything.

There have been a few published examples of overzealous code enforcement bureaus using drones to identify otherwise out of sight violations.

Which... I hate codes and ordinances as much as anyone, but if you're in violation you're in violation.

Better to address the overzealous part of that by forcing a more relaxed policy on the bureau through their leadership (e.g. the mayor).

> public airport built by elected officials after due consultation

That's optimistic.

Most airports are private.

Your other examples are power plants, halfway houses, low income housing are (often) private as well.

There is of course a value judgement. But this is a matter of degree not kind.

Take that specific corporation's name off of it and yes it does. People need their things. Those things come from somewhere. How do those things get distributed? Some sort of packaging distribution warehouse center thing. It'll have trucks and vans and other industry, but other than the Amazon label on it, in what world does low income housing need to exist but warehouses can't?

It's also completely reasonable that I don't want a halfway house, with the felons and drug addicts it'll bring even if they aren't throwing loud parties, in my neighborhood. I also don't want trains full of coal to rumble past my house at 1am on their way to the power plant.

Ironically Amazon charges less to deliver it in one day rather than two, which is what leads to this kind of madness in the first place.

I didn't say that amazon warehouses > low income housing, but I've edited my comment to make it more clear. Warehouses and distribution centers need to exist, even if they don't use drones.

> And honestly, for the kind of items quoted in the article (toothpaste and batteries), I simply plan ahead to have stock.

Or as it happens in most urban areas of the developed world: I can just walk 5-10 min to buy it from a nearby store.

It adds a very low cost per-package low-package no person required option to their delivery options. A truck with a human will almost always be cheaper, but if you have a single package that will take a 10 minute detour for a driver due to a fluke of purchasing patterns, being able to drone deliver it could reduce the cost of that specific package delivery significantly, thus reducing overall system costs especially if that truck can now spend more time delivering goods in denser areas.

I dont think that is necessarily the case. There are lots of practical logistics considerations that affect each around routing an capacity.

By way of example, rolling is more efficient than flying, but I would be shocked if flying an 80lb drone 1 mile over houses if it wasnt more efficient than driving a 10,000 lb van 2 miles on a grid, with dozens of stops.

Independent from Physics, there is financial efficiency, which has its own set of arbitrary variables.

> physics isn't just a good idea, it is the law.

That is awesome.

I'm just pointing out the additional benefits besides the immediacy of delivery. Add to that list reducing the amount of tire chemicals emitted. Add reducing the congestion on the roads for commuters and emergency response vehicles. If the noise pollution had extremely low impact, these benefits would be worth mentioning whether or not it solves the climate crisis on its own (and I understand it wouldn't come close).

But, admittedly, I'm taking a rather naïve view here, assuming drones would displace trucks, but in reality they would likely add to the deployment, not replace it. Some packages are likely too big, or need a signature, or exceed drone delivery capacity, etc. There is a forcing function on the business (not logistics) view, the automation of the drones mean there might be fewer trucks but there might be more deliveries ordered as a result, too.

> The Wing team did some optimization passes on the blade design to reduce the noise

i was about to say, just make the drones quieter. That tech exists and surely a company like Amazon can spend some effort on reducing noise. Now how much to reduce has to be defined by a regulatory agency like the city/county/state government or whatever. Seems like a pretty standard noise issue that can be solved