[nomilk]

> when your lunch only weighs a few ounces, delivering it in 2-ton gas powered vehicles is wildly inefficient

Seems absurd when it's put like that. This is possibly something we'll look back on and struggle to comprehend how it was ever the go-to solution.

[bnegreve]

The size of these vehicles is certainly absurd, but flying packages with drones that consume most of their energy to fight gravity does not seem particularly efficient either, (e.g. compared to small road electric vehicles with the same payload, which would have its own practical problems).

[jcims]

Sure but there's a tradeoff with ground transport. A drone can make the trip with much shorter traveled distance and potentially higher speed, resulting in higher utilization per vehicle. It also doesn't interfere with road traffic, which could have externalities in longer idle time for other vehicles at intersections and whatnot.

Both are better than Garret in his 2007 Ford Explorer driving around town all day delivering timbits and tacos.

[Someone1234]

> resulting in higher utilization per vehicle

A van can hold thousands of 2-ounce packages, whereas a drone can hold one. If you look at it in terms of a one-package utilization rate, a van has over 100% rate, because it holds multiple packages, in fact it may have over a 1000% utilization rate using that metric.

You're essentially wasting tons of energy and resources getting very small packages delivered faster, but in urban setting there are no efficiencies here, quite the contrary.

[LeifCarrotson]

I just hope my DoorDash order is not sandwich #9,836...

A locomotive would be even more efficient over long distances, carrying 200,000,000 such packages. A containership even more so, carrying more than 20x the capacity of a big freight train, though I don't think they have the draft to fit up the drainage ditch behind my house. Nor do I have rails.

I jest, but the long tail is a real problem with such efficiency calculations.

You're right that it's never going to make sense to have migrating swarms of drones flying above the interstate carrying packages cross-country, but are real efficiencies here at the individual level:

https://www.cell.com/cms/attachment/4b8da4bb-42c2-4b91-baf2-...

Graphic from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2022.100569.

[lttlrck]

This is why I don't feel bad ordering smaller items from Amazon when I could drive across town and get it myself.

But Uber eats and DoorDash are a reality, and I would pay someone to pick something up for me from Home Depot within the next hour. Services like Zipline have the potential to help out there.

[jcims]

>This is why I don't feel bad ordering smaller items from Amazon when I could drive across town and get it myself.

I've long thought this. UPS isn't driving from the hub to my house to deliver a package, 90% of the incremental driving distance is the length of my driveway.

[tnel77]

>>A van can hold thousands of 2-ounce packages, whereas a drone can hold one.

In a perfect world, yes. In reality, no. You would need a perfect storm of a huge wave of orders all to the same restaurant (or cluster of restaurants) to be delivered to the same neighborhood to ensure timely delivery so the food was hot and the customers were happy. In real life, you are almost guaranteed to never hit the ideal conditions.

Edit: After re-reading your comment, I’d agree with you for the non-food deliveries. My comment was obviously focused more on the UberEats use case.

[hypertele-Xii]

Clear example: Hospitals have helicopters, but most patients are still moved using vans. The helicopter is faster (when patient's life is acutely ending), but prohibitively expensive to utilize for every patient.

[janosdebugs]

That example doesn't quite hold up. A helicopter is roughly the same size and weight as an ambulance and needs to transport a whole bunch of equipment. If we could get a Zipline drone to drive on the street, it would be vastly more efficient than its airborne brethren, but our infrastructure isn't set up for that.

[dgacmu]

It's also a lot more dangerous, both for the patient and the flight crew. It takes a pretty critical need to offset that.

[cancerhacker]

Here's a thought: vehicles that are already scheduled (uber or robot-taxies) are already scheduled from point A to point B. Drone scheduling could piggyback on this such that as large vehicle passes restaurant R at A', a drone from R lands and disgorges your sandwich into a locker mounted on a landing pad on top of the taxi. (hand waves - that's just a mechanical problem, can't be worse than what a fast food place is doing.) As the ground vehicle approaches B, a new drone (or the same drone, if it was just hitching) could finish the delivery to your home H at B'.

Obviously it would take a lot longer than a direct flight, but the energy consumed would be far less.

Or, people should just make a sandwich.

[marcosdumay]

You've got the answer, but just to point the problem with your comment from another point of view...

No, last mile delivery is made package by package. If you place 100 packages in a van and go delivering them, you will make 100 mostly independent trips, just carrying all the packages at once.

That's why those are very often done by motorcycle.

But indeed there is often a highly correlated trip segment. The Amazon's model of running a van into your neighborhood and distributing things there by drones may make sense. It doesn't make sense for Uber Eats business model, but it makes sense for Amazon.

[cosmojg]

That's why I exclusively order my food delivery via container ship!

[dwighttk]

Garret’ll get there in a hurricane though

[wolfram74]

I was raised to consider ordering takeout in truly awful weather as pretty rude.

[crazygringo]

I realize that has good intentions, but it's actually terrible advice.

Delivery drivers are paid basically solely with your tips.

If you don't order, they don't make any money that day.

If you want to be nice, order that delivery, but tip more.

Bad weather is actually their favorite because people tip more.

[philsnow]

There might be different ideas of what makes “bad” weather.

Some Californians think that any weather at all is bad, and some midwesterners think “there’s no such thing as bad weather, only wrong clothing”.

I wouldn’t hesitate to order delivery if it were raining or snowing, but maybe in this world there are people who would still order delivery during a tornado warning (because that way they don’t have to risk driving during a tornado).

[randmeerkat]

> I was raised to consider ordering takeout in truly awful weather as pretty rude.

What’s more rude? Ordering takeout in bad weather, or not ordering takeout and indirectly punishing the delivery driver’s livelihood whenever the weather is bad..?

[purpleflame1257]

Timbits and Tacos sounds like an amazing D&D parody.

[reacweb]

The existence of migratory birds proves that the loss of energy due to the Earth's gravitational pull is not so catastrophic. A vehicle in motion also loses energy because of the friction of the wheels. Above a certain speed, air friction becomes the most significant loss. The comparison of the energy balance of a vehicle on the road compared with a vehicle in the air is not as clear-cut. Vehicles on wheels are much heavier and require infrastructure (roads) that must be taken into account.

[abtinf]

You may have noticed that migratory birds have a somewhat different mechanism of flight than typical drones.

[singularity2001]

zipline has wings

[tyingq]

They do show that: https://www.flyzipline.com/technology (scroll down, it first shows the thing that it drops, rather than the drone itself.)

Lots of CGI and notices about "simulated" though. The videos that appear to maybe be real show something that does have wings, but looks too small/light/thin to carry much around.

[Philip-J-Fry]

The ones they are currently using in Africa are normal drone planes. They drop their payload without stopping though, so the payload has to be packed securely and nothing that can break easily. So it's used for medical supplies. This what Mark Rober's video was about.

If they were to create a drone that can deliver arbitrary packages, then it needs to be able to lower a package safely. That's what those renders are, they show a typical multi-rotar drone with small wings. So it can stop and lower a package. I don't think there's any real footage of these yet.

[sllabres]

Came here to say that (i think their operations in Africa are quite impressive) but it seems as their "Zips" are a different kind of breed and more like a drone than a plane.

[da39a3ee]

If you were to ask a migratory bird, they'd tell you that it's fairly tough. You have to put on enough subcutaneous fat to double your body weight, and then do it knowing that either you or some of your friends and family will die.

[hef19898]

Also, with global warming and stuff, if possible those birds migrate less.

[shrubble]

There is no evidence to support this statement.

[hef19898]

Plenty ofnevidence, of e.g. geese, migrating tonplaces further north. But surey birds don't exist anyway.

[zitsarethecure]

Yes, but how does the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow compare to that of one delivering a coconut?

[crooked-v]

The actual harm from the drone's wasted energy is pretty negligible aside from the waste heat itself, though, as compared to the many, many side effects of road vehicles of any kind (for example, just starting with the air pollution from tire particles).

Of course, that equation changes a bit once there are enough drones that noise pollution and collisions or other incidents become a real issue.

[algas]

Noise pollution and collisions are a much, much larger problem with cars, since they're constrained to two dimensions while drones can use three. Plus, cars tend to kill people when they collide with each other (or with pedestrians), and drones would not. Hopefully they will all use engineered quiet propellers (such as Zipline uses) and electric engines (similarly).

[fragmede]

> Plus, cars tend to kill people... and drones would not.

I think this is an good move by the FAA, but I also think that if one of these airplanes flew right into my head at full speed, I'd die.

[bombcar]

People are ingenious at getting killed, and birds can do it so eventually if we have enough drones someone will die to one.

However, much mini deliveries could be done with vehicles smaller than a full size car - and places where it is common you see lots of mopeds and similar.

People still can die to them.

[brandensilva]

It seems like a drone falling out of the sky could still kill people. It just seems less likely to us because there aren't as many right now to worry about like cars.

I like these devices for use for medical supplies but do worry how polluted the skies could become when multiple companies are flying these things for standard packages.

[pontusrehula]

Where I live we can get deliveries by starships https://www.starship.xyz/. The vehicles are kind of cute when you see them in action.

[mb_72]

They've been working on those things in Tallinn for years, and I've only ever seen them operate in a very limited area, and even then it's not unusual to see them seemingly stuck at the nearby rail crossing. Meanwhile a human on a Bolt scooter ate their and their investor's lunch IMO.

[stevekemp]

They do look cute, I remember being completely taken-aback the first time I saw one in the wild - I had to resist the temptation to stand in front of it, to see what would happen.

Though I did wonder how they'll cope in winter-weather. I can't imagine they'd do so well on snow/ice.

[kwhitefoot]

But there are plenty of places that don't have much snow and ice where they should be perfectly practical. Ice shouldn't be a problem, they could swap to studded tyres in the winter just like we do for cars here in Norway. Snow would be a much bigger problem though I agree!

[93po]

I'd encourage you to stand in front of it. Commercializing public walkways like this is fine, I guess, but as a human walking around for non-commercial reasons, I feel like you have the right to do whatever you want (within reason) that doesn't impact other humans.

[kwhitefoot]

They've been using them in Milton Keynes too: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/apr/12/robots-deliv...

Also DPD piloted something similar in Milton Keynes and is now going to do it i ten towns in the UK: https://green.dpd.co.uk/news/16

[NikolaNovak]

Ok that seems like far more practical idea

[throwaway94250]

They seem practical until you realize how easy it is to steal one.

[bombcar]

The starships on the road are free you can just take them I have 458 starships.

Those wheels look moderately impractical- larger wheels might have more clearance.

Reminds me that we had pneumatic tubes and miniature railways between buildings a century ago.

[XorNot]

Aircraft are more energy efficient then cars[1] at scale. But even a light plane like a Cessna 172 does 13L/100KM[2] depending on flight speed. Certainly more then my Prius, but it can take a much more direct route too.

There's also the simple practical issue: self-driving cars can't navigate a complex crowded environment, whereas self-flying planes navigate a much simpler environment with many more regulatory controls on behavior.

[1] https://www.sustainablebusiness.com/2014/02/surprisingly-air...

[2] https://www.flyouts.com/vliegtuig/cessna-172

[two_handfuls]

I lost confidence at the very beginning of the article:

> In fact, unless you drive a car that gets 33.8 gallons per mile (or carry more than one passenger), new airplanes coming off the assembly line are more fuel-efficient

Cars typically get about 0.03 gallons per mile, so it’s not even close.

[deely3]

> Aircraft are more energy efficient then cars[1] at scale.

Some aircraft and definitely not drons for now.

[krisoft]

What is a drone to you? If you are only thinking about multicopters when you hear that word then yes, those are not efficient and probably never will be.

But the term commonly refers to all unmanned aerial vehicles.

For example a Global Hawk unmanned aircraft can fly 14,000 nautical miles and remain aloft for 42 hours. They are by definition very efficient. That is a drone.

On the other end of the spectrum The Spirit of Butts' Farm crossed the atlantic with 118 US fluid ounces (3.5 L) of fuel. It was flying for ~39 hour and 1,881.6 mi (3,028.1 km). That is about 2045 mile per gallon if I count it right. That is very efficient, and of course since the aircraft was unmanned it is a drone.

[misnome]

> For example a Global Hawk unmanned aircraft can fly 14,000 nautical miles and remain aloft for 42 hours. They are by definition very efficient. That is a drone.

Wow - this is what they are planning to use to deliver packages?

[hef19898]

If so, unit economics will never work, regardless of cargo.

[itishappy]

They use fixed wing aircraft, yes.

[dwighttk]

Do not want what global hawk is delivering

[abtinf]

These are representative of the kinds of drones and aircraft relevant to the context of this post?

[itishappy]

Moreso than the quadcopter you probably have in mind.

[madacol]

zipline's "platform 1" is an airplane, and "platform 2" is a quadcopter shaped like an airplane. https://www.flyzipline.com/technology

So they should have much better efficiency than typical quadcopters

[baq]

Depends on perspective. You could say it's a glider with a quadcopter bolted underneath for VTOL capabilities.

[cma]

If Prius was adapted to run optimally on extremely high octane leaded fuel what could it get?

[bombcar]

High octane does NOT increase total available power, in fact it reduces it.

It enables higher compression so you can get more power per unit of engine weight, but the fuel efficiency per gallon is lower.

And the lead is for the valves.

You can get more efficient planes but you can’t overcome the need to fight gravity at some point.

[cma]

I thought higher octane improved efficiency by avoiding premature combustion, but that may have only been relevant before electronic fuel injection.

[baq]

The Prius doesn’t fly, so let’s not repeat the leaded fuel mistake.

[dgacmu]

It's been studied; drones are somewhat better: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02411-5

E-bike courriers are probably better still but drones are probably faster if you can make them work.

A lot depends on the delivery pattern, of course.

[myself248]

Nice thing about drones is they're unlikely to kill anyone if they crash, and they're not sharing the roads with cars in the first place.

In some places, bikes are first-class citizens of the road, but in other places they're very much not respected and riding one is tantamount to suicide. Every single cyclist I know, when they meet another cyclist, immediately asks about gnarliest injuries and they compare scars like dogs sniffing each other's butts. And in the past 20 years I've lost more friends to cycling fatalities than any other cause of death.

I'll take the drones, thankyouverymuch.

[concordDance]

Ideally you'd use little remote controlled electric cars, but driving on the ground is a MUCH more complex problem.

[amelius]

With a sufficient number of drones in the air simultaneously, this becomes a far more difficult problem.

[BurningFrog]

Birds are pretty dumb on average, and handle it really well.

[c22]

Birds are not that dumb and compared to drones they're Einstein.

[hef19898]

Specialized in flying, including eyes and brains, at that!

Autopiloted is much easier than cars because air space is less crowded with less obstacles and extremely well controlled. Low flying delivery drones don't fall in that bucket.

[sverhagen]

Birds aren't real. Google it, "do your own research"!

[marcosdumay]

Only on places where they concentrate. It's not really flying that is difficult, it's approach and take-off, because they have to go through all of the heights.

[bombcar]

Big sky theory falls apart near airports already, and a crowded drone filled sky would have issues especially with unexpected weather.

[heylook]

Only if you assume there is no regulator or shared protocol.

[amelius]

Anyway, I guess the main problem is that most people will not want a sky full of drones just so that some random Joes can get their stuff from Amazon or AliExpress a little sooner.

[m_fayer]

If the skies fill with drones while traffic jams ease, there’s less double parking for delivery, and streets generally start looking more airy, people may make the association.

[wuiheerfoj]

I imagine people felt the same way when cars were popularised, but we‘ll get used to the convenience

[tinsmith]

Historically speaking, tech is relatively unregulated and protocols are all over the place. I'd say it's a safe assumption.

[bombcar]

Drones schmones.

Miniature zeppelins is where it’s at. Bouyancy to just below negative so very little energy needed to lift the device.

[m4rtink]

It is still a trade-off - you end up fighting drag, potentially for much longer than a regular drone.

[rini17]

There are other things you need energy for. Such as overcoming wind and rain.

[ptman]

https://www.starship.xyz/

[bluescrn]

In a crime-free utopia, they could be useful. Or maybe within a large corporate campus type environment.

But 'on the streets' in the real world, they're just targets for vandalism and theft.

[falcor84]

Couldn't that be said about humans? As I understand it, once upon a time in some parts of the world, walking alone unarmed could get you abducted and sold into slavery. But then we decided as a society that we want to have this "Human Rights" thing and now most of us feel relatively safe about other people on the street not randomly abducting or assaulting us.

So I'm just not getting the argument for why we can't trust humans to not vandalize or steal robots, especially internet-connected ones that constantly film their surroundings. I for one believe that just like we can learn to be civil to one another, and can also extend our civility to other species (e.g. we generally don't go around kicking dogs we see on the street), we can also be civil to robots.

[krapp]

It depends.

Somewhere like Japan, with a strong cultural sense of societal cohesion and obligation, it could work.

But I live in a country where "societal cohesion" and "obligations" are considered communist propaganda and our constitution gives us the right to as many guns as we want in case we decide to hunt the government for sport.

I mean, this robot[0] make it all the way across the Netherlands and Germany, and only 300 miles into the US before getting beheaded.

[0]https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/03/us/hitchbot-robot-beheaded-ph...

[kwhitefoot]

They are already in use in the UK.

[jcims]

Those look perfect for campus delivery applications.

[prawn]

OK, what about if our supermarkets are actually really tall buildings, and the drones glide down from the distribution platform on the top floor...

[falcor84]

That sounds pretty much the same as existing "catolog stores"[0] like Argos[1] (although your idea is probably a bit more automated).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalog_merchant

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argos_(retailer)

[newsclues]

Bikes for local rapid delivery are hard to beat.

[shafyy]

This might be news to some people, but there are other modes of transportation / delivery than 2-ton cars. "2-ton cars vs. flying drones" is a false dichotomy.

[Maken]

Indeed, they are ignoring the much more efficient and eco-friendly "low-paid worker on a bike" alternative.

[shafyy]

This is a policy problem, not a tech problem. People need to be paid a living wage, period. The lack of this and the subsidizing of delivery fees by VC money has led people to believe it's somehow sustainable to sit on your lazy ass, order food and have it delivered within 30 min for next to nothing. Or maybe people know that it's not sustainable but just don't give a shit. Greedy corporations and unethical people will always exists, that's why we need better laws.

[mrd3v0]

I'd say it IS a tech problem as much as it is a policy problem. Technology historically has allowed humanity to develop society in a way that constantly minimises risk, reduces "hard labour" tasks, and delegates repetitive "brainless" work to computers. Only with technology could these policies come into fruition. Otherwise, we would be effectively shutting down industries completely, and as far as I am aware this rarely if ever happens.

I do believe minimum wage should be set at the local living wage standard, and that companies like Uber are exploiting their workers through weak labour laws, but unless the market is much more tightly controlled, in a somewhat-free market (which is most of the world) economy, it is a tech issue.

[shafyy]

No, no. We're talking about food delivery here, which is a purely luxury need and market. This is not a problem tech needs to solve.

[rakoo]

It is absolutely a policy problem because technology doesn't come out of nowhere, is not free for everyone to use, and not anyone benefits the same way.

Automating all work, sure. Removing people's mean of subsistance (a wage) and keeping the money for yourself, no. In a capitalistic society, technology only helps people if capitalists give away the product of (automated) labour, and that is not what is happening.

[merpnderp]

If we want to optimize economic growth with the most powerful force in the universe, compound interest, shouldn't we pay people the market rate which is usually some combination of the scarcity of labor and the economic value of that labor?

If this rate is too low, then that is what the welfare system is for. Forcing employers to pay a "living wage" for jobs that don't generate a "living wage's" economic value simply retards the economy and robs our children of a wealthier future.

[endisneigh]

> This is a policy problem, not a tech problem. People need to be paid a living wage, period

false. no one is forcing these people from taking those jobs (uber eats, grub hub, etc) at the agreed upon wages. tell me how somehow it would be better for those folks if these jobs didn't exist at all given that unemployment in the USA is incredibly low.

[bigfudge]

Creating a regulatory environment in which a large fraction of the population end up on wages that don’t sustain a reasonable standard of living is a problem for everyone, not just those experiencing low wages. from a utilitarian perspective we could easily be better off as a society taxing tech bros enough to pay them UBI rather than doing food deliveries on serf wages.

[endisneigh]

Again, unemployment is low and no one is forcing anyone to take those jobs. If someone is that is a problem, yes.

UBI is never going to happen

[Cthulhu_]

Or the even more efficient and eco-friendly "make and bring your own lunch", but somehow this isn't considered, instead it's a long thread of drones vs cars vs mopeds and low-wage delivery people.

[wongarsu]

Or low-paid worker on a moped, which is very common around the world, though maybe less desirable in America's suburbia.

Also low-paid worker sounds strictly better for employment than autonomous drone.

[pxndxx]

Are delivery people that drive cars that well paid?

[bigfudge]

No, but not quite as badly paid as those on bikes.

[amenghra]

But you have to take into account the low-paid worker’s environmental impact! You can’t beat an autonomous EV’s eco-friendliness. /s

[moffkalast]

Starship robots come to mind as well.

[jcims]

As with everything, that greatly depends on where you live.

[shafyy]

Sure, but I'd wager most of food delivery happens in cities, not in rural areas. We know how to build pedestrian and bike friendly cities.

[ghaff]

I don’t even really Live in a rural area and there may be a few fast food options but there’s nothing I’d want delivered. There are things I can go out and pickup in 15 minutes or throw together at home that I’d rather do.

In general barring difficulty in leaving the house food delivery seems awfully optional.

[JKCalhoun]

Maybe we should be asking why we order a few-ounce lunch at all?

There was a time when ordering lunch was reserved for when you were already "on the town" shopping and the like.

Even debating what mode of transportation should be used seems to miss the larger issue and is even kind of gross to my mind.

[sotix]

Agreed. Something I commonly observe, which I’m guilty of too, is getting so excited about technological innovation that we can’t see the forest for the trees. I get that the idea of being able to order a sub sandwich on a whim and have it delivered directly to you via a drone is really cool, but why not plan ahead and bring it with you? One could also go to a sandwich shop next to where they work. My coworkers and I would walk to the sandwich shop next to our office once per week when I still worked in an office. Seems remarkably less wasteful and more efficient all around.

I don’t see it ever happening, but I’m not even sure we need package delivery available for anything every day of the week. If we limited it to once per week for bulkier items (such as large furniture), we could reduce a lot of waste and traffic. Rather than deliver tiny lunches via drone, perhaps we should reconsider the greater idea of ordering objects. As someone without a car in a car-dependent city, it’s certainly on my mind.

And this doesn’t expand into societal implications of ordering everything without interacting with other humans. That’s perhaps a more interesting conversation!

[jauntywundrkind]

I struggle with it already. It hurts seeing it.

And I live in such a lovely city. I can bike anywhere so quickly, so easily. Scooters & micromobility are abundant. But so many people (so many roommates over time) make a habit of ordering delivery, on such a regular basis. It's unfathomable to me: both the negative impact in general, and particularly here where it's so close & pleasant to go walk or bike around. It's such a huge expense to the world, and such a great enriching activity, getting a little walkabout.

[ghaff]

Not everyone bikes or uses scooters. I don't. But, if I'm in a city, I'll certainly walk someplace rather than getting a food delivery which I haven't had since... I really couldn't tell you when.

[true_religion]

When I was in the city, I'd order delivery from the restaurants on our street. The waiter would just walk up, and hand the food to me.

Delivery apps just made people get food from a larger variety of places. Before them, you'd order from the pizzaria that's on the route home, and pick up up before jumping back on the subway. Or you'd eat at the diner on your block.

[ghaff]

Which sounds... fine.

[hef19898]

But anonymous "brand" kitchens in some industrial corner of town are so much better compared to the family owned place around the corner... /s

[Cthulhu_]

Speaking as someone who just goes downstairs and makes a sandwich, or who takes some to work, ordering lunch seems absurd to me. Is it that cheap in the US / do you earn that much? Food culture is so weird over there.

[blincoln]

It's not cheap. When I still worked in the city, I was always blown away by how much of their salary most of my coworkers were willing to spend on restaurant lunches every day.

Typically I would expect a restaurant lunch in a major city in the US to cost $20-$40 per person after taxes and tip.[1] So, essentially $5,000 - $10,000/year. This was for people with salaries running from about $50,000 - $200,000 before income tax, so something like 7% - 20% of their after-tax income.

Making a lunch and bringing it instead should be less than half of that, especially if one makes extra food for dinner and brings the leftovers for lunch the next day, but I guess a lot of people actively dislike cooking for themselves.

A decent amount of tech workers also get dinner at restaurants nearly every day, which is of course even more expensive.

[1] Excluding inexpensive franchises like McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, because my coworkers typically did not get lunch at places like that.

[ghaff]

When I worked in the city Chinatown was pretty cheap but I agree in general. Going out every day, especially for a reasonably healthy lunch, adds up.

[diydsp]

I see a dichotomy... many colleagues bring lunches to work in e.g. glass microwaveable containers, but many have an "ick" abt prepping their own food. A huge "tax" on the lazy.

[TheCoelacanth]

Compared to the richest countries like Norway or Switzerland it's cheap.

Compared to everywhere else, Americans make more.

[nobrains]

In the so called "developing" countries, delivery app deliveries are mostly on light motor bikes and even ebikes.

[pastage]

According to zipline[1] it is still better than motorcycles at least. Considering we are talking about 100km, I would not consider a bicycle an option for such small packages.

That said for me delivering a package by bicycle+ train + bycycle is an option but it will always be more expensive unless you can stand long delivery times.

[1] https://www.flyzipline.com/newsroom/stories/research-insight...

[datameta]

The vast vast majority of couriers in NYC are on e-bikes or mopeds.

[dahart]

At least a delivery vehicle is amortizing by delivering multiple lunches to multiple people in a single trip. When someone drives themselves to lunch, they’re using a 2-ton vehicle for a single lunch.

[Retric]

Delivery vehicles for packages aren’t traveling very far between stops. A 2 ton vehicle dropping off 200 packages on a 100 mile delivery route is averaging 0.5 miles per package and 0.125 kWh where a drone might need to fly 15 miles each way per packages = 30 miles to and from some central hub to do those same routes. Drones are light, but 0.125 kWh to fly 30 miles seems unlikely.

Food delivery might be a better comparison, but 2 pizzas and a 2 liter soda is heavy enough to need a fairly massive drone.

[moffkalast]

The drone would still be the better option. Electric motors and propellers don't produce any pollution, unlike combustion engines and/or car tyres.

And of course the obvious part where it removes hundreds of thousands of vans from already massively congested road traffic. The skies remain mostly unused.

[Retric]

Drones aren’t necessarily electric, and cars can be EV so that doesn’t favor one over the other.

Pollution wise you need to consider the lifecycle of a drone which is likely far worse than a van. Many drones are using very dirty small internal combustion engines. Safety wise replacing 1 van with 30+ heavy drones each traveling far more could easily favor the van.

[moffkalast]

Any solution that isn't a stopgap is necessarily electric given climate change, and while EVs do reduce CO2 emissions they increase particle emissions from heavy tyre use by 20% (given their massive weight), which is arguably even worse for residential use. Anything that is in contact with the ground will produce some kind of particle pollution.

[Retric]

The extremely limited flight times and weather conditions you get from electric drones means large scale drone deployments will likely require small internal combustion engines and all the associated pollution from that. Some hybrid approaches where a land vehicle uses fully electric drones for drop off have been prototyped, but they don’t reduce tire ware.

Longer term it’s more debatable but we hand waving delivery drones as completely pollution free when we don’t know what from they would actually take is simply wishful thinking.

[moffkalast]

To be clear I'm talking about zipline's specifically designed delivery VTOLs, not your average consumer quadrotor. I wouldn't call over an hour and a half an "extremely limited flight time" and 50 miles is enough of a delivery range to make it operable from whichever restaurant/warehouse is making the delivery. And that's just today's tech.

[bitcharmer]

> Drones aren’t necessarily electric

That's very interesting. What are current (commercially viable) alternatives to electric drones?

[myself248]

Just search "drone engine" or "UAV engine", there are tons of fuel-powered engines (many optimized for JP-8 since the military likes to be single-fuel) made for planes of various sizes.

The larger ones tend to have an electric generator to power the control surfaces, smaller drones tend to carry a battery for that and use the engine solely for forward propulsion.

This is for fixed-wing only, so it would apply to Zipline P1 but not P2, by the way. There have been some engine-over-electric setups to run multirotors from a single powerplant, but it's generally awful. It may or may not work for hybrid architectures like a quadplane, or a single-engine-VTOL like a tailsitter, all these things are in active development.

[Retric]

Gasoline or kerosene seem to be popular in R&D projects. Read up in the Nitro Stingray or Yeair Hybrid Quad.

[paxys]

Delivering single boxes of lunch in two ton vehicles isn't really common anywhere in the world outside of the US and maybe a handful more countries.

[akmittal]

Most of the work use mopads/motorcycles for delivery. A lot more efficient than cars.

Here in India a lot of delivery services moved to electric 2 wheelers

[walleeee]

Single meal delivery as an institution is wildly inefficient. The absurd inefficiency of the car as delivery vehicle does not make drones a meaningfully wiser choice.

For every proposed technology, we need desperately to ask: does this really make ecological sense?

Delivering necessities (e.g. medicine) to a remote township with a drone makes sense. Drone-drop pizzas do not.

[seoulmetro]

That's because it is absurd. The same way any convenience is absurd.

Most of the deliveries around the world are done by motorbikes though, not only that but they are done not one at a time but in big chunks. Which is not absurd and pretty good.

[RC_ITR]

Sorry for being an annoying biker - but only if we built communities where deliveries could happen on human-powered <50kg vehicles.

No, let's instead try to game the superlinear scaling of power to weight in helicopters!

[6stringmerc]

Now if only robots could make the lunches too. Or wait, just replace the humans in need of delivery with robots or AI. Disruption!

[marcosdumay]

To be fair, it's almost certainly delivered by a motorcycle.

But that's still hundreds of kilograms.

[solarpunk]

This is why bike delivery is ideal.