It’s not that I’m a huge advocate, it’s more that I’m baffled and amused by your strange ideas about city. Do you imagine cities are all like Times Square, shoulder to shoulder people? I live in a dense residential area of a large city, on a street that is about 2 miles of large apartment building housing thousands of people. Outside of rush hour, there are very few people milling about. You may run into one or two other people on a given block. I guess this could be a problem the drones are careening horizontally through the streets, but I would guess that would fly above head height m and drop vertically for the delivery. As for lobbies, no, I don’t think they would fly into the lobby. But apartment building managers are capable of adapting to change, and would probably set up an appropriate spot outside or on a roof.
For a particular niche market of which I am a portion, I thought of a wonderful use for this system today.
I’m a home nurse. And, contrary to what the hospital nurses tell the patients, I do *not *have immediate access to every wound care dressing and device known to mankind. We don’t even have a full supply closet at the office, like they have in hospitals, because half the stuff we cannot order until we get a prescription for it - we have no “standing orders” in home care. We have no doctor who signs for us to keep sterile saline in stock, or a budget that allows us to store hydrogels or alginates (or a room to keep them in!)
So when I go out to a home where someone’s been released from the hospital, and the hospital nurse has told them explicitly to *hide *whatever wound care supplies they sent them home with, because, “the home nurse should provide your supplies,” or they haven’t sent them home with anything at all, I’m often up shit’s creek without a paddle. No, I don’t have them. I don’t even usually know what you *need *until I get there. Then I have to order it, and it’s likely to be a few days before whatever I order is shipped. So I have to make do with whatever I can cobble together out of gauze and paper tape.
30 minute delivery? Sign me up for that, for* work. *I could walk in, look at your dressings, order the supplies and have them delivered before I’m done with your paperwork and ready to change the bandages? Bliss…
I didn’t say wall-to-wall people, I said too many people to land safely. And no, I actually wasn’t referring to New York City in my post.
Google Street View is great because of how simple it is. Google vans literally drove down every street with a camera taking pictures. Having the thought, “Let’s do this,” required more brainpower than actually doing it did.
It looks like UPS is looking at this too, although the article suggests that it would be used to transfer packages between distribution centers. This would eliminate the chance of Fido attacking it or Bubba blasting it out of the sky with his shotgun, although Bubba could use the Stand Your Ground defense. 
This seems to me like it will be a real problem, if we ever try to have hundreds of drones in the air all the time.
Accidents will happen. There are potential mechanical problems, electronic problems, and weather problems. Now, we accept some accidents in our lives…But unlike, say, car wrecks-(which we don’t mind too much , even when they kill people)–drone accidents will be scary.
Any slight problem will be a disaster. A drone can’t just pull over onto the side of the road and call for a tow–it’s going to come down, hard and fast. People will be a lot less forgiving of an object falling on their heads than they are of , say, a car skidding on the ice.
When we walk around the city, we naturally look right and left…but we don’t look upwards.
Yet. I can imagine in a hundred years that in fact may be commonplace.
Reminds me of a joke going around Penn State (and probably a lot of other schools too) back when I was there:
How can you tell if a student is a freshman?
Easy, he looks both ways before crossing College Ave. (upperclassmen know that College Ave is a one way street)
I’d be of the mind that the bigger of the two problems is having a drone reliable enough and “clever” enough to reach a specific house / building. Once that can be achieved with a sufficient level of reliability, “a suitable place to drop-off” is not much of an obstacle. Every single building I have ever visited has some variation of a loading dock, porch, bin centre or passenger drop off that could be adapted for this.
For private housing - the solution is laughably easy…
I am so looking forward to seeing this become a reality, and can imagine fantastic economies from it. Rather than have a 16’ Van or truck delivering a 5 pound package, you can have something with a footprint of around 3’ - how can that not be a good thing?
What’s the chances of an airplane-drone collision if drones became common?
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I’m in the “neat idea but not practical” camp. The logistics of how to drone-deliver a box to a suitable place at every address boggle the mind./QUOTE]
There is no need to be able to deliver to every single address. Instead people would need to set this up at Amazon shipping options. If they don’t have an appropriate space (or a neighbor with an appropriate space or a local Amazon delivery point at a convenience store…) they wouldn’t set it up.
Everyone’s talking about accidents and shotgun attacks on drones and not asking the real question; why in the hell would you want to do this even if it worked?
This is a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Extremely efficient and cheap delivery systems are already in place with no need for any further development of infrastructure; “Drone delivery” can’t be THAT much faster than FedEx and would be ten times as expensive once development costs are incurred. If you need something in 30-60 minutes they have emergency courier service for that, too.
There’s just no way this isn’t a PR stunt.