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Comment by FroshKiller | Hacker News Reader

I live in an urban area in the US. UPS, FedEx, and the USPS all drop my packages off unsecured at my front door as it is. What difference does it make whether it's a person in a truck or a drone doing it?

As an Amazon Prime member, I sometimes use Prime Now to get deliveries made in two hours from a limited selection of products, and that requires a minimum order and a delivery surcharge. It's still a great option that I take advantage of. I have to imagine I would also take advantage of an even faster drone delivery option for some things: snacks when I haven't gone shopping and have people coming over (and I can't be bothered to go out to do proper shopping beforehand), the odd household item I need but don't feel like driving to pick up, etc.

The "not driving" part is the key for me personally. I don't really like risking life and limb to buy potato chips.

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USP, FedEx and the USPS all leave your packages in unsecured areas. These drones would have to literally drop your packages off in a city. Those are very different actions.

The logistics of even getting close enough to the ground to not obliterate your package, in an open enough area, while avoiding people and other obstacles (both stationary and moving) is a nonstarter for even small cities imo. Good luck in NYC.

You're overstating the dropping thing. I've had shipments with plenty of rough deliveries and rougher trips in the truck on the way to be delivered. Being carried in the air and lightly dropped from 10 or 20 feet off the ground isn't going to hurt my Blu-Ray copy of Captain America: Civil War.

I think when you guys say "cities," you're talking about some kind of nonexistent arcology of mile-high cyberpunk buildings where each tenant lives in 50 square feet. I live in a city, mere minutes from downtown, in a town home that is neither big nor fancy nor isolated. There is ample space to fly right up to my door step without ever coming close to any person or vehicle that could conceivably be close to my front door unless someone were standing in front of my front door, and even then, I'd probably lay out my special RFID-enabled chartreuse drone delivery area designation mat on my back deck instead or whatever. It's not a hard problem. All the hard parts have been solved. It's mostly legal now.

Yea, a blu-ray movie isn't hurt by a 20 foot drop. A blu-ray player is. Most packages are not made for shocks, just constant pressure (think the difference between someone punching you and someone sitting on you).

Also, I'd bet that what you consider a safe range for drone operation and what a federal aviation safety official (or non-US equivalent) considers safe are two totally different animals.

My threshold for what is safe is irrelevant, and we can change laws if we want.

I can walk down to my sidewalk and have a half-ton vehicle going 45 mph drive within 20 feet of me in a moment. There is no question in my mind that that circumstance is much more dangerous than any delivery drone you care to send coming within half that distance. We live with some very generous tolerances for risk.

But to speak to the Blu-Ray player being hurt by the drop, sure, but what makes you think every possible item to be delivered would need to be accounted for in modeling a service like this? I assume there's a narrow band of items that make good candidates, and I'm not interested in hypothetical problems with delivering items that aren't good candidates in the first place.

This sounds like your neighborhood needs some traffic calming. 20 is plenty.

It's funny you should say that. I've posted about traffic calming in my neighborhood before! It's calmed in one direction but not the other.

Still, even going 20 or 35 mph is enough to kill someone, and 20 feet is not a lot of room, especially with no barrier between the sidewalk and the car. Last weekend, a driver swerved to hit a car that was stopped in the street and struck the tree on the corner of my lot. Luckily, no one was hurt, but the key word is "luckily." Anyone who'd been on the sidewalk would've been paste.

Compare that to the rather less immediate concern of a drone that might fall out of the sky, a drone that might clip me.

The point of reduced speed is not to avoid killing people when striking them, but to reduce the odds of a driver losing control of a car and ending up on the sidewalk.

Sure, a car going 5 mph is still going to kill you but is easier for the driver to control so it doesn't. But again, "reduce the odds." I don't care how slow you're forced to go around that curve, there's still nothing between you and me on the sidewalk but your hands and feet on the controls.

> My threshold for what is safe is irrelevant

>> There is ample space to fly right up to my door step without ever coming close to any person or vehicle

You used your threshold for safety as the basis of your argument.

> what makes you think every possible item to be delivered would need to be accounted for in modeling a service like this?

I think this because I highly doubt Amazon wants to make the move to drone delivery in order to move potato chips, or single video games, or movies which cost at most 70 bucks. The aim to automate delivery as a whole through drones, not automating special cases. We're not talking about a set of weights here. I gave the example of a single blu-ray player, which is a reasonable item for delivery.

Even if you want to stay with your special case, dropping items from 20ft in the air, or lowering a drone with spinning propellers to street level, in a city is a issue. Companies don't like potential liability.

The BlueRay player you pickup in Best Buy survives getting tossed from top stock after closing just fine?

On the contrary, I sell things online (and through Amazon) and it's common advice that we sellers treat packages as if they will be thrown/dropped, because during shipping they often are. More expensive products tend to have more padding since it's cheaper to add more airbags in than replace the product. And Amazon is of course incentive to not have products break all the time either, their customers wouldn't trust it anymore if it did. From my viewpoint as a seller, customer trust is a huge issue to Amazon. I've seen many high dollar accounts get shut down for potential trust issues.

I agree that there is some protection for drops. However, the expected drop in an Amazon warehouse, or a UPS shipping center is not a 20 foot one. I'd doubt it's even a 10 foot one. I've seen the insides of both of those buildings (my local ones). Things get shaken, stacked, and dropped. A 20 meter drop is ridiculous, and the logistics of getting a drone 10 feet off the ground in a city is still and issue imo.

I suppose it depends on the city, I guess in NYC where there are many people on the sidewalk it would be hard, but in Atlanta I don't think it'd be an issue, there's usually quite a lot of space.

You nailed it. People frequently point out the unattended delivery aspect or talk about shooting drones from the air to get "free" packages.

At the end of the day it's a lot easier for theieves to just follow the UPS truck.

I am still waiting for Prime Now in Vancouver!

From a physical standpoint, can a drone get to your front door?

I think targets are going to be inevitable. There's no way that a drone is going to be able to deliver to my front porch. It would be much easier to delivery to my deck in back.

The "not driving" part is the key for me personally. I don't really like risking life and limb to buy potato chips.

By chance, do you have vertigo?

No, I don't have vertigo, just a healthy aversion to the deadliest routine task most of us engage in. The longer I go without an accident, the more aware I am that for all I do to minimize my risk factors while driving, I have no control over my fellow motorists.

But yeah, a drone could get to my front door. I agree with you, though, that having some way to designate the delivery area might be necessary.

I feel the exact same way about being on roads. Where I live (Texas), 3531 people died in a traffic fatality last year (including someone I knew) [0].

[0]: http://ftp.dot.state.tx.us/pub/txdot-info/trf/crash_statisti...

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