> The experience in College Station has highlighted another challenge: NIMBYs—or people who push for developments to be “not in my backyard”—potentially curtailing where Amazon operates.
The term NIMBY seems to have been popularized to refer to people dogmatically refusing any change, doesn't seem to apply here, where the article describes a real nuisance:
> His neighbors began calling the fleet flying chainsaws. Smith, a retired civil engineer, preferred a different comparison: “It was like your neighbor runs their leaf blower all day long,” he says. “It was just incessant.”
> If Amazon had conducted the maximum number of flights outlined in its plans reviewed by the FAA, a drone might have buzzed by Smith’s house about every 58 seconds for 15 hours a day.
> [After the end of the experiment,] Inside his house, with the double-paned windows shut and TV on, Smith could no longer hear the drones.
Funnily enough, the fact that these drones are being employed to deliver "toothpaste and batteries" is really kind of a perfect microcosm of the kind of American planning and zoning foundational to modern NIMBYism—in a different environment, daily necessities like that would be available at a corner store very close to where people live, but we've found it preferable to make such restrictive residential areas and require businesses to have large parking lots such that corner stores have disappeared in favor of strip malls and big box stores, and now we're trying to replace those with annoying drones.
While I oppose restrictive zoning, that fixing that isn't going to change the situation. Where people live is a compromise and the single family house in the suburb has some great properties that mean many people will choose that set of compromises. The density of single family houses doesn't support a corner store. It did before the automobile/streetcar, but now that those are common people will prefer to travel to to the much cheaper big-box store (which also has more selection) for most purchases and that doesn't leave enough "I just ran out of one thing" to support a corner store.
Don't get me wrong, there will be more corner stores if they are allowed. However the economics of retail mean that most single family homes cannot not be in walking distance of a corner store. It gets worse when you account for single family houses being so car dependent people will out of habit drive to their neighbors even though the walk from where they park their car is longer than the door to door walk.
If technology now allows us to JIT distribute from a single store / warehouse across a larger area, isn't that better?
Imho, the real problem with American suburban design is (a) the elimination of spaces where community organically happens (read: corner store) without replacement with something else (e.g. a park) & (b) the centralization of corporate power enabled by monopolies (e.g. Amazon logistics).
To (b), I'd much prefer if drone distribution centers like this were city-owned property, with the drone service provided by one or more drone operators, with adjacent warehouse space for any company that wanted to distribute.
Are toothpaste and batteries really daily necessities though? I buy toothpaste maybe once every two years in bulk, and batteries basically never, due to pretty much everything being rechargable via USB.
Well, and a lot of people don't want to pay the premium usually associated with a bodega/corner store if they don't need to. I frequented some local camera stores over the years when they were more of a thing and, however rose-colored glasses I want to view them through, they weren't that great relative to today's options.
Here in Dubai, I have 2 or 3 corner stores within maybe a hundred meters of my residential tower and 9/10 purchases for groceries are through a delivery app.
You're not wrong, but it will take decades to fix American urban development, if ever at all. Today, Amazon could use the US postal service for last mile delivery, which delivers six days a week and has systems in place for large scale shippers to deliver parcels to the closest hub. The choose not to, in the same way they squeeze their fulfillment workers as hard as they can. They want to make a logistics robot that does not require humans.
“Some of the College Station residents who have complained about the noise say they still largely support the testing of drones. But many believe Amazon miscalculated by locating its depot close to so many residences.”
I agree that it seems improper to characterise these complaints as NIMBYism. The criticism is thoughtful, targeted and rises as much from Amazon’s lack of communication as from its drones’ noise.
That quote shows that "NIMBY" is especially proper and fitting!
They support the idea in theory, but don't want it to be close to them. Like it should be in someone else's backyard.
Generally NIMBYs consider whatever they're opposing to be a real nuisance. If they don't find it a real nuisance, they don't bother. You're describing a caricature, not an actual group of people.
> You're describing a caricature, not an actual group of people.
It's a term used to describe people who find everything a "real nuisance". There are NIMBYs in my town who spent months protesting sidewalks being built in a new residential subdivision.
NIMBY is characterized by wanting or being ok with something, just not too local to themselves. So they may be in favor of affordable housing in the city, just not in their part of the city where low income students will be going to theire kids' schools.
San Francisco is the classic example of wanting more housing, but nobody is ok with it being built near them.
When people go to Nextdoor to drum up opposition to a development on the basis that they have enjoyed driving by that disused refinery for a decade, maybe we shouldn't care whether they think "anything other than a disused refinery on that particular lot" is a nuisance.
The term NIMBY seems to have been popularized to refer to people dogmatically refusing any change, doesn't seem to apply here, where the article describes a real nuisance:
This is textbook No True Scotsman.
They're all NIMBYs to varying degrees. I'd rather have delivery drones overhead than government surveyors looking to fine people because their sheds aren't setback far enough or insurers looking to misclassify shadows on roofs as overhanging limbs and whatnot. At least I potentially get something out of it that way.
So because people oppose some specific change that is causing documented problems for them, they're automatically anti-progress? It should be incumbent on Amazon to resolve the problems their neighbors are having with their drones.
Also I don't understand what "government surveyors" have to do with anything. Do you realize that satellite images of your roofline and property are detailed enough and cheap enough that people use them for roofing estimates?
There is nothing wrong with expressing one's concerns. Problems arise when governments allow the concerns of NIMBYs to override the greater social good, allow NIMBYs to stall the decision making process, or fail to cerify the legitimacy of the claims being made.
In a case like this, yes it is NIMBYism. On the other hand, having high frequency flights over an existing residential are, for the primary benefit of one party (i.e. Amazon) would seem to support the groundings.
College Station’s residents appear to fail your own test. They are prohibited by Texas law from being “allow[ed]…to override” or stall anything, and seem to have made a good case for why a drone buzzing by “every 58 seconds for 15 hours a day” is at least a legitimate grievance.
I’d also add a necessary condition to NIMBYism: it’s not in my backyard. NIMBYs want the thing. Just not near them; implicitly: near someone else. The hypocrisy animates the exasperation inherent to the term. The complaints in this article seem to be closer to not in anyone’s backyard.
I don't think this is NIMBYism. The complaints are kind of reasonable and also, allowing a private company like Amazon do this most certainly is not something for the greater good. It's just good for Amazon.
YIMBY orgs are almost entirely bankrolled by tech interests. It's absolutely in their interest to portray any opposition to any development as indistinguishable from the affluent people who don't want to improve anything (aka nimbys).
Definition of NIMBY does not involve dogmas or opposing any change - it's just opposing a change while supporting it to happen elsewhere. It has nothing to do with the change having real or perceived negative impact on the individual. In this specific case, yes there is a real nuisance to the people - but they are happy for the testing to commence elsewhere. This is textbook definition of NIMBYism. The examples here in UK are, "Oh I love renewable energy, but I don't want to see these ugly wind turbines from my window" or "Yes please more bicycle paths, but, no they can't pass through my street".
Yeah, NIMBY means "Not In My Backyard" implying that we want that thing, just elsewhere. I don't think anyone in this situation actually wants the drones whizzing around when there is little actual benefit in the first place, and a lot of noise.
If Amazon had bothered to engage with the Texas legislature during the process, they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by having it declared an essential business function and exempt from a large number of regulations. Our legislators are remarkably business-friendly.
The term "NIMBY" is usually used for projects that the NIMBY supports, or at least acknowledges the need for, but just doesn't want in their back yard: power plants, halfway houses, low income housing, etc.
Using NIMBY for people that don't want the equivalent of a privately owned airport dropped into their neighbourhood seems an abuse of the word.
In fairness, a lot of people here and elsewhere do use NIMBY broadly to mean anyone opposed to things they personally want to exist--at least in principle.
Agreed, I think that the term has become highly abused in a lot of political discussions. Many folks, even ones that I generally respect, will disdainfully dismiss any reasonable concerns to their preferred policy as selfish NIMBYISM.
Are you implying an Amazon Warehouse suddenly using drones and filling the air with noise for their corporate enrichment is the same as a public airport built by elected officials after due consultation?
Who doesn't want their Amazon packages delivered sooner? If I could get my packages today, instead of two days later, and there's just this humming noise outside because of it? Some people would prefer the package sooner.
NIMBYs are anti-progress because of impacts to their lives and their neighborhood. The power plant needs to exist, but arguably does it? What's wrong with the old one? Why do they need to build a new one? Halfway houses and low income housing doesn't need to exist any more than a warehouse does. This one happens to be owned by Amazon, but where you want the distribution center for goods to exist, and who do you want to have own it? That this Amazon warehouse makes more noise than other warehouses and they don't want it there is definition NIMBYism.
I dont want my Amazon packages sooner, if it means creating more noise polution, air traffic, energy use, broken plastic waste etc..
> Halfway houses and low income housing doesn't need to exist any more than an Amazon warehouse does.
This must be a joke, right?
EDIT: I guess this is what the opinions of Amazon execs must be. We all question how people can be so blind that they make decisions which lead to huge amounts of suffering and mass destruction of the earths resources, well here it is in black and white.
I'm surprised that you would compare drones loudly delivering cookies and toothpaste, which are arguably "convenient," with halfway houses and power plants. These people sound entirely reasonable in their opposition to the former, and I don't think you would find many of them opposing the latter in their neighborhood provided the new neighbor followed the norms of the community. That's really what this is about. Amazon installed a bunch of equipment that was so loud in operation that it scared wildlife away and ruined peoples' quiet enjoyment of their property.
I could see the community having the same reaction if the halfway house decided to have loud parties in the evening or the power plant was constantly emitting exhaust noise into the neighborhood. But it also strikes me that they're entirely reasonable people who just want some peace and quiet.
> Who doesn't want their Amazon packages delivered sooner? If I could get my packages today, instead of two days later
What if you could, but it was 10x more expensive? Obviously you wouldn't want it. Now take a step back and realise that for many people, having drones flying over the city all day long is enough of a reason to not want it.
Without drones I can still get Amazon packages delivered same day. And I don't see how drones would improve delivery speed regardless as they're at best last mile so you have all of the logistics to get to the drone location.
It seems like a gimmick. At best to reduce labour costs of delivery drivers.
>NIMBYs are anti-progress because of impacts to their lives and their neighborhood
Improved lives and neighborhoods is the greatest progress possible. Like...isn't this the goal? Suddenly having endless droning of drones is not "progress" in any way at all. It's a regression. People move away from that sort of nuisance, not towards it.
> Who doesn't want their Amazon packages delivered sooner?
Me, at least enough that I cancelled Prime, and took advantage of that "Amazon day" thing they had whenever I could.
I'd love for someone like Amazon or Walmart to offer weekly delivery to my neighborhood, and I could just order things as I remembered them, all delivered every Wednesday or whatever. Save time, save gas, save having to think about it.
Pretty much everything I want from Amazon is delivered on the same day that I ordered it, free of extra charge, because I live in a real city where one van can serve thousands of customers in a single trip. Needing aircraft for same-day delivery is a problem that suburban development patterns caused for themselves.
Drone delivery is a fundamentally bad idea. That is, except for the exceptional cases where it matters (like a medical emergency).
Drones won't replace trucks; they are aiming at the last mile. There is already a perfect way to deliver a small payload over a mile: take a bike. That's healthy, that's economical, that's ecological, that's quiet. Why isn't Amazon working on that? Because it doesn't bring them profit.
They are working on that, well... kind of. They somehow convinced the NYC government to allow them to legally operate little trucks in bike lanes. They claim that they are "bikes" (bikes have two wheels, that's what "bi" means, these have four)
I like those vehicles, honestly -- delivery trucks are going to park in the bike lane regardless and these are much smaller and safer to maneuver around. I want to see more of them and hope it leads to more bike lanes being built in NYC.
Amsterdam lets little vehicles like this operate in its bike lanes. They can't be capable of going over ~30 mph. I imagine a similar policy is being followed here.
Normally I have no problem with "bicycles" having more than two wheels operating in bike lanes (for example: recumbent trikes, trailers), but I agree - those vehicles seem more like golf carts than cargo bikes. I'd be interested to know how much they weigh empty and what proportion of their power comes from the rider rather than the "assist." Probably better for the city overall than a full size truck but I wouldn't be stoked to share the bike lane with one...
Also those are definitely going to be parked blocking the lane lol.
The niche for drone delivery is the one that Zipline found - delivering medical supplies in remote areas with poor road access.
For the majority of cases, it's a stupid idea. If you really want to automate away delivery drivers, self-driving vans probably make more sense, when self-driving tech gets good enough.
I agree with your point, and I think that there are a few exceptional cases (some of which I believe Zipline addresses) where the alternative to the drone delivery is nothing. But to my knowledge, those are very rare use-cases.
Amazon isn't working on that because they have a bunch of software developers and they need to justify their existence with something other than making AWS better or fixing the bugs with their shopping website. Drone delivery is probably a "sexy" project some EVP or C-level is pushing because they want to add it to their resume.
Amazon are piling money into this because being able to deliver a small package over the last mile with zero people involved is a massive win to them. People are lazy, unreliable, hard to manage, and demand luxuries like toilets and water. The sooner they can get rid of them the better.
I don't think these drones are for places that can be traversed safely or reasonably on bicycle. They're great for suburban sprawl where cycling isn't really viable and road trips take 10x as long to reach the places a drone can go.
I don't blame residents at all. FIFTEEN hours a day is incredibly long. That would be from 6am to 9pm. Imagine having a drone buzzing by your house 930 times a day during all waking hours. Want to sleep in? Go to bed early? Best of luck. I lived across from a neighbor who blasted their music. I could never crack a window and had to blast the TV. Even on the back side of the house, I had to use headphones to drown out the noise. Maybe I am overly sensitive to noise pollution due to this experience, but I'd absolutely throw a fit if I had to live like that because of Amazon.
Even half of that time is unacceptable in my opinion. I use my backyard as a sanctuary from all the chaos going on in life. It's a place where I want to sit, relax, and listen to the wind or birds. I find leaf blowers and the noise of power tools somewhat annoying too (tbf, I also use them from time to time), but if it were happening for hours and every single day, I might actually snap.
> “Inside his house, with the double-paned windows shut and TV on, Smith could no longer hear the drones.”
Well! That’s… a relief, I guess.
> If Amazon had conducted the maximum number of flights outlined in its plans reviewed by the FAA, a drone might have buzzed by Smith’s house about every 58 seconds for 15 hours a day.
I guess we said the same thing when Amazon was normalizing next-day (and then same-day) delivery, but… why? When could cookies-on-demand, as Amazon’s marketing promotes, possibly be that important?
Zipline’s blood deliveries in Rwanda I get [0]. But chintzy consumer conveniences? It’s like putting lights and sirens on Prime delivery vans…
I'm not really a supporter of drone deliveries but, to me, the benefits also include fewer delivery trucks on the roads. And, I don't know how many last-mile trucks are EVs but the drones don't run on gasoline, right?
There are benefits other than the immediacy of delivery, but the noise pollution is too much for me, too.
I am curious how the math works out with respect to the delivery trucks. It seems like, ounce for ounce, it’s cheaper to move matter across the ground than to yeet it through the sky. Each delivery truck with 100 orders inside represents some number of passenger cars that are avoiding a trip to the store—and those fleets lend themselves well to electrification (cf. Rivian’s fleet for Prime [0])
But as you point out, there’s certainly a crossover point as the delivery cadence shortens, where you can’t collect 100 orders and aggregate them into a single route: if we’re really dispatching a whole vehicle per order per household, maybe drones are the realistic way. Why couldn’t they be drone bike-messengers or something, though?
Road-based delivery requires less energy than air-based delivery, under the assumption that the roads exist (which they do, because of other reasons). This is simple physics.
I see no advantage to drones in areas with a road network. Vanity, yes, and cool sci-fi memes, but physics isn't just a good idea, it is the law.
Trucks running on gasoline is a very small fraction of the climate crisis. Manufacture, maintenance, and scrappage of trucks/drones/whatever delivery device you choose (along with generating the power needed to run them) dwarfs tailpipe emissions.
I read the comments and see an overuse of "NIMBY".
It’s become a catch-all label that can oversimplify complex debates. People slap it on anyone opposing local projects, and it shuts down discussion implying selfishness without digging into the actual concerns.
What is wrong with residents concerned about noise, privacy, and safety? Those are real issues worth wrestling with, not just knee-jerk "not here" whining.
Maybe folks repeat it because it’s a quick way to sound clever online without saying much.
It’s funny to see my home town mentioned here in this context after over a decade of quipping online that the noise will always be an issue for drone delivery. I live in a more noisy urban area now and yet, I still can’t fathom the noise of drones buzzing over my house every day all day, or as often as I see Amazon trucks passing by. It would be awful. I think people like the idea of this, but have never actually witnessed what the sound of these devices is like. It’s loud.
And fwiw, college station is no quiet place. We have trains and they can be heard for miles. My house was a couple miles away from the tracks and I could hear the vibrations and horns all throughout the night as a kid. I still remember the cadence exactly even a few decades later.
I live in College Station. Drones did not fly over my house, but the people who lived in neighborhoods with Amazon drone service were out of their minds. First off, it is illogical to deliver little itty bitty items to one person, while profoundly disturbing all the neighbors and everyone on the flying chainsaw's rout: a very unbalanced social interaction. Great – now they are moving to Austin to try this, moving from a conservative town to a liberal one. I don't think they will do any better. Is it OK to lasso them? Shoot them out of the air? btw it is legal in Texas to shoot bothersome wild pigs anytime....
Readit News
The term NIMBY seems to have been popularized to refer to people dogmatically refusing any change, doesn't seem to apply here, where the article describes a real nuisance:
> His neighbors began calling the fleet flying chainsaws. Smith, a retired civil engineer, preferred a different comparison: “It was like your neighbor runs their leaf blower all day long,” he says. “It was just incessant.”
> If Amazon had conducted the maximum number of flights outlined in its plans reviewed by the FAA, a drone might have buzzed by Smith’s house about every 58 seconds for 15 hours a day.
> [After the end of the experiment,] Inside his house, with the double-paned windows shut and TV on, Smith could no longer hear the drones.
Don't get me wrong, there will be more corner stores if they are allowed. However the economics of retail mean that most single family homes cannot not be in walking distance of a corner store. It gets worse when you account for single family houses being so car dependent people will out of habit drive to their neighbors even though the walk from where they park their car is longer than the door to door walk.
If technology now allows us to JIT distribute from a single store / warehouse across a larger area, isn't that better?
Imho, the real problem with American suburban design is (a) the elimination of spaces where community organically happens (read: corner store) without replacement with something else (e.g. a park) & (b) the centralization of corporate power enabled by monopolies (e.g. Amazon logistics).
To (b), I'd much prefer if drone distribution centers like this were city-owned property, with the drone service provided by one or more drone operators, with adjacent warehouse space for any company that wanted to distribute.
Dead Comment
I agree that it seems improper to characterise these complaints as NIMBYism. The criticism is thoughtful, targeted and rises as much from Amazon’s lack of communication as from its drones’ noise.
It's a term used to describe people who find everything a "real nuisance". There are NIMBYs in my town who spent months protesting sidewalks being built in a new residential subdivision.
It's kind of inherently a caricature.
San Francisco is the classic example of wanting more housing, but nobody is ok with it being built near them.
This is textbook No True Scotsman.
They're all NIMBYs to varying degrees. I'd rather have delivery drones overhead than government surveyors looking to fine people because their sheds aren't setback far enough or insurers looking to misclassify shadows on roofs as overhanging limbs and whatnot. At least I potentially get something out of it that way.
Also I don't understand what "government surveyors" have to do with anything. Do you realize that satellite images of your roofline and property are detailed enough and cheap enough that people use them for roofing estimates?
In a case like this, yes it is NIMBYism. On the other hand, having high frequency flights over an existing residential are, for the primary benefit of one party (i.e. Amazon) would seem to support the groundings.
College Station’s residents appear to fail your own test. They are prohibited by Texas law from being “allow[ed]…to override” or stall anything, and seem to have made a good case for why a drone buzzing by “every 58 seconds for 15 hours a day” is at least a legitimate grievance.
I’d also add a necessary condition to NIMBYism: it’s not in my backyard. NIMBYs want the thing. Just not near them; implicitly: near someone else. The hypocrisy animates the exasperation inherent to the term. The complaints in this article seem to be closer to not in anyone’s backyard.
EDIT: softened wording a bit
It's a complaint that something should not exist close to me, though I think it should exist somewhere.
Prison, power plant, waste facility, low-income housing, paper mill, railroad, etc.
Using NIMBY for people that don't want the equivalent of a privately owned airport dropped into their neighbourhood seems an abuse of the word.
Or an airport, yes?
Are you implying an Amazon Warehouse suddenly using drones and filling the air with noise for their corporate enrichment is the same as a public airport built by elected officials after due consultation?
NIMBYs are anti-progress because of impacts to their lives and their neighborhood. The power plant needs to exist, but arguably does it? What's wrong with the old one? Why do they need to build a new one? Halfway houses and low income housing doesn't need to exist any more than a warehouse does. This one happens to be owned by Amazon, but where you want the distribution center for goods to exist, and who do you want to have own it? That this Amazon warehouse makes more noise than other warehouses and they don't want it there is definition NIMBYism.
> Halfway houses and low income housing doesn't need to exist any more than an Amazon warehouse does.
This must be a joke, right?
EDIT: I guess this is what the opinions of Amazon execs must be. We all question how people can be so blind that they make decisions which lead to huge amounts of suffering and mass destruction of the earths resources, well here it is in black and white.
I could see the community having the same reaction if the halfway house decided to have loud parties in the evening or the power plant was constantly emitting exhaust noise into the neighborhood. But it also strikes me that they're entirely reasonable people who just want some peace and quiet.
What if you could, but it was 10x more expensive? Obviously you wouldn't want it. Now take a step back and realise that for many people, having drones flying over the city all day long is enough of a reason to not want it.
It seems like a gimmick. At best to reduce labour costs of delivery drivers.
>NIMBYs are anti-progress because of impacts to their lives and their neighborhood
Improved lives and neighborhoods is the greatest progress possible. Like...isn't this the goal? Suddenly having endless droning of drones is not "progress" in any way at all. It's a regression. People move away from that sort of nuisance, not towards it.
Scanning through my recent orders, 90+% of them could take a week to arrive and I wouldn't have noticed, much less minded.
Me, at least enough that I cancelled Prime, and took advantage of that "Amazon day" thing they had whenever I could.
I'd love for someone like Amazon or Walmart to offer weekly delivery to my neighborhood, and I could just order things as I remembered them, all delivered every Wednesday or whatever. Save time, save gas, save having to think about it.
Deleted Comment
I don't order from Amazon, and whenever I get things delivered, I'm usually fine walking 5 minutes to the store where I have it delivered.
And honestly, for the kind of items quoted in the article (toothpaste and batteries), I simply plan ahead to have stock.
Deleted Comment
Drones won't replace trucks; they are aiming at the last mile. There is already a perfect way to deliver a small payload over a mile: take a bike. That's healthy, that's economical, that's ecological, that's quiet. Why isn't Amazon working on that? Because it doesn't bring them profit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NYCbike/comments/1gw1wlj/amazon_box...
Also those are definitely going to be parked blocking the lane lol.
And autonomous ground-delivery vehicles have and are being tried. There are tons of issues with those, too.
The drones were an interesting if obvious idea to try, but I think they aren't quite practical.
Now hydrogen drone blimps might solve many of the problems, but introduce new ones. And helium is too expensive.
emergency systems need to _just work_.
Your "take a bike" solution is far superior. Thanks for your post.
For the majority of cases, it's a stupid idea. If you really want to automate away delivery drivers, self-driving vans probably make more sense, when self-driving tech gets good enough.
So are helicopters, but we use them for air ambulances as and when conditions dictate it is safe.
Amazon are piling money into this because being able to deliver a small package over the last mile with zero people involved is a massive win to them. People are lazy, unreliable, hard to manage, and demand luxuries like toilets and water. The sooner they can get rid of them the better.
Well! That’s… a relief, I guess.
> If Amazon had conducted the maximum number of flights outlined in its plans reviewed by the FAA, a drone might have buzzed by Smith’s house about every 58 seconds for 15 hours a day.
I guess we said the same thing when Amazon was normalizing next-day (and then same-day) delivery, but… why? When could cookies-on-demand, as Amazon’s marketing promotes, possibly be that important?
Zipline’s blood deliveries in Rwanda I get [0]. But chintzy consumer conveniences? It’s like putting lights and sirens on Prime delivery vans…
[0] https://time.com/rwanda-drones-zipline/
There are benefits other than the immediacy of delivery, but the noise pollution is too much for me, too.
But as you point out, there’s certainly a crossover point as the delivery cadence shortens, where you can’t collect 100 orders and aggregate them into a single route: if we’re really dispatching a whole vehicle per order per household, maybe drones are the realistic way. Why couldn’t they be drone bike-messengers or something, though?
[0] > In 2024, Amazon’s [electric] vans from Rivian delivered more than 1 billion packages to customers in the U.S. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/everything-y... - boy that would be a lot of flying chainsaws.
I see no advantage to drones in areas with a road network. Vanity, yes, and cool sci-fi memes, but physics isn't just a good idea, it is the law.
It’s become a catch-all label that can oversimplify complex debates. People slap it on anyone opposing local projects, and it shuts down discussion implying selfishness without digging into the actual concerns.
What is wrong with residents concerned about noise, privacy, and safety? Those are real issues worth wrestling with, not just knee-jerk "not here" whining.
Maybe folks repeat it because it’s a quick way to sound clever online without saying much.
And fwiw, college station is no quiet place. We have trains and they can be heard for miles. My house was a couple miles away from the tracks and I could hear the vibrations and horns all throughout the night as a kid. I still remember the cadence exactly even a few decades later.