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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

>Bryan Woods, College Station’s city manager, said at the meeting that city officials ran tests of a Prime Air drone and found it had noise levels between 47 and 61 decibels.

That's surprisingly quiet. I don't know the situation in Texas, but 40% of the EU population is exposed to road traffic noise exceeding 55 dBA. My own back garden exceeds 60dBA for most of the day, with regular peaks closer to 70 dBA due to railway noise.

https://www.who.int/europe/news-room/fact-sheets/item/noise

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Not sure adding to this existing problem is a good idea. Non-electric cars should be completely banned from city centers sooner or later. Noise is a hugely underestimated source of stress (and by proxy, illness).

Automated deliveries by bots are fine, but they don't have to be in the sky. Learn from China, they've already perfected parcel delivery with electronic delivery boxes in basically every community. All that's left to do is take out the human deliveryman, which they aren't doing yet because wages are so cheap. But in the US it might already be profitable, if not yet it will be very soon.

Electric cars are honestly just as noisy. Aside from big diesel trucks or wannabe fast n furious characters, you don’t really hear engine noise. You hear road noise from the tires, which is worse with weight and therefore worse with heavier evs.

Imagine that every so often, without warning, a 47-61 db house fly buzzes somewhere in your house. I'd grab a swatter and hunt it down before it disturbed me again.

The decibels is probably less the issue than the actual tone/pitch. It’s not that it’s so loud it makes your ears hurt, it’s that the pitch of the sound is extremely grating.

I imagine the higher frequency makes a difference at the same dBA?

A-weighting takes into account our greater sensitivity to higher frequencies. It isn't perfect due to the complexities of how we perceive noise, but it's generally quite reliable.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-weighting

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