Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sodman | Hacker News Reader

As long as there are no rules against a Harley Davidson which can be heard by anyone within a mile radius cruising down the street at 10pm (same goes for loud muscle cars, trucks etc), it seems like we shouldn't go arbitrarily restricting drone noise.

With regards to cameras in public places, I'd be far more worried about somebody hiding in the bushes quietly with a DSLR that nobody knows about. At least with a drone you're very aware that it's there. If you want to change the laws about taking pictures in public places - fine (and good luck!) but again, singling out drones doesn't make much sense here.

View on HN

But you have to consider that things are grandfathered in because we are used to them. I mean, if tobacco was discovered today, no one would be allowed to sell it. Changing rules on things like motorcycles and other existing vehicle is really hard.

This is a new thing, and (in my opinion) we should make rules based on how those things will affect us as collectively, rather than purely out of a need to be consistent with all existing things.

Remember also, how often are you bothered by a loud motorcycle? Living in a city, it is fairly regular here, sometimes in the middle of the night, but not THAT regular.

For all we know, drones over my house might be an every five minutes thing. Even if they are much quieter than that occasional window-rattling Harley, it could be far more annoying overall.

I'd be more amenable to this argument if motorcycles etc were products that stopped production years ago, and we were left with a handful of privately maintained vehicles. The reality is though that you can still buy a brand new Harley today, for a relatively affordable price (starting at ~$7.5k). To be clear - I'm not saying we should outlaw motorcycles entirely... my point is that since I can buy a brand new loud motorcycle for funsies, neighbors noise complaints be damned, I should also be able to buy and operate a drone too. I'm all for new noise restrictions, but they should apply to everything.

I don't know if I can put much stock in the frequency argument either... If you live in a neighborhood and 3 guys with motorcycles move in, you'll be hearing them very regularly. Drones aren't going to come any more often than delivery trucks do today, and they're certainly loud enough to be heard, not even counting the extra wear on the local roads, and increased pedestrian danger.

"they should apply to everything."

Well that seems based purely on consistency, and I just disagree with that. I'm all for outlawing (or heavily taxing) newly produced, loud motorcycles, but it's not a hill I want to die on. Internal combustion is a fading technology anyway.

Remember that internal combustion replaced horses, which at one time covered city streets in massive amounts of manure. As new transportation technology arrived, should we have just said "anything that is equal or better than tons of horse crap is A-ok"? Or should we hold new technology to higher standards, while letting the annoying old stuff fade away on its own?

"Drones aren't going to come any more often than delivery trucks do today"

I find that an odd assumption. If the cost gets low enough, as it will, you'll have people ordering drone-delivered trivially small purchases that they want delivered immediately, such as cups of coffee. Meanwhile, the frequency of loud motorcycles will get less and less, as electric vehicles become more common over the next few decades.

If it were up to me, drone deliveries would just have to pay an annoyance tax, to compensate. This would create an economic incentive to develop other alternatives, such as robotic deliveries that roll on the ground.... which to me makes far more sense anyway, since they aren't spending most of their energy simply keeping themselves airborne as drones do.

ICE powered regular passenger cars are going to die off sooner or later sure, but I don't think motorcycles are going away in our lifetimes without some heavy regulations.

My gut says an annoyance fee makes sense, but I think we need to be careful... Maybe it's only something you enforce after you hit a threshold of deliveries per day/week or something? Today I can place a single amazon order for multiple small items (think batteries, toilet roll, etc), and there's a decent chance they'll all come on separate trucks, maybe even from different mail carriers. That doesn't feel much different? I can't think of too much more beyond a fresh cup of coffee that a drone could deliver that you can't already get today with services like UberEats et al. Should my neighbors pay an annoyance fee when they order pizza and the 18 year old delivery guy swings by with his radio on full blast? I'd love if the answer was yes, but that doesn't feel realistic.

Re: holding new technology to a higher standard... Sure, but we have to make sure not to disadvantage the new tech so much as to completely prevent adoption. If it costs $50 to get some batteries delivered in the next hour via drone vs $0 on an old ice-powered truck in the next day, we'll never move on. Even if we electrify the delivery trucks, they still cause significant wear and tear on local roads, and still pose a hazard to pedestrians (especially kids playing in otherwise quiet residential streets). We should be incentivizing companies and consumers to move away from this as fast as possible in my opinion. Make triple-glazed windows cheaper, invest in quieter drone motor tech, whatever it takes. If we regulated car emissions in the early days like we do today, we might still all be on horses...

I disagree. A drone can be used to harass them with its presence in an anonymous manner. It can also more easily follow someone around, as opposed to someone in the bushes. A DSLR with a long lens doesn’t have that mobility, is considerably more expensive, and stabilizing video at very long distance is hard.

I’m also not sure what bearing a Harley has on this situation - we can reason about this without bringing motorcycles into the picture. But for consistency sake I am also against vehicles that are as loud as motorcycles and don’t accept the weak argument that the loudness is a “safety feature”.

I've never once seen a drone and not been able to pin-point its operator within 30 seconds. Usually you hear the whirr of the drone and look around, there'll be somebody standing nearby with a massively conspicuous radio controller.

It's already illegal to fly drones outside of line-of-sight of the operator, and once they start getting big enough (>250g) to allow a longer flight time, the operator is also required to have a spotter, a license and register the drone with the government (USA). The new rules mentioned in the article also directly try to address this with remote ID - the idea is that it's a "digital license plate" which must be openly broadcast from all drones > 250g. So if you see a drone doing something illegal (eg no operator within line of sight), it should be trivial to report it and for the operator to face consequences.

My point about Harleys was that of precedence - we already live in a very noisy world where it's perfectly acceptable to buy/modify incredibly loud machines (louder than drones by a lot) for primarily entertainment purposes, to be used in public or residential areas. My leaf blower literally makes more noise than my drone and usually runs for 10x as long, to say nothing of a multi-stage gas-powered snowblower. My point here is that things are loud, and drones aren't even close to the loudest things we already find totally acceptable, so it feels arbitrary to ban them over noise concerns. For what it's worth, I'm totally on board with restricting night-flying for noise reasons, I just don't think we need additional laws beyond existing noise ordinance for daytime flying.

Finally, if you're feeling very paranoid about this from a camera/anonymity perspective today (TFA says the new rules have ~30 months before coming into effect), most drones broadcast their video feed on analog channels, so you can buy a $10 receiver that'll plug into any modern smartphone and you can see exactly what the drone sees. That should lead you back to the operator if necessary (bonus points if you record your screen for evidence of any wrongdoing).

It is already illegal to modify the exhaust to make your vehicle louder. Does't seem to bother cops though.

illegal where? that's not the case anywhere in the US that I'm aware. Most any legislation about exists is limiting modification to environmental parts like catalytic converters.

NY, probably every state.

Here is a handy link of all 50 state's noise regulations for motorcycles. Not every state has one, but many of the larger ones do.

Also, many modified motorcycle exhaust systems will not have a catalytic converter in order to save on weight, this is especially true for sport bikes.

https://drivinglaws.aaa.com/tag/motorcycle-noise-limits/

TIL. Thank you.

Right, I should have specified "Enforced laws". Considering how easy this one is to enforce, and how rarely it's actually enforced, it basically doesn't exist.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com