10 ms·

UK set to have automated drone superhighway

70 points by hanoz 4y ago

bsenftner 4y ago
Monumentally stupid idea: as our "civilized world" devolves, these will be bored moron target practice, as well as perfect targets for commercial disruption. The short sightedness and immaturity of human society knows no bounds, it's a black hole.
- pjc50 4y ago
  > bored moron target practice With what? Remember this is the UK.
gumby 4y ago
This is a really good idea and I'm eager to see how it works out. Quadcopters can't fly that high and I think if they flew willy-nilly all over the place it would be a noise/privacy issue. Requiring "highways", say over the access roads of actual highways, would be a big win on many fronts.
- mr_gibbins 4y ago
  I think that would be problematic - there would be a significant proportion of downed drones, whether by mechanical failure, bird strike, overhead cables, bridges, battery outages, etc. It would be particularly dangerous for drivers to have random drone drops over highways. If we tried to site the highways elsewhere, how many people would complain about noise over their gardens or houses? How many enterprising people with slingshots would make a sport out of downing drones? In the UK we have NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard) and BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody) who would besiege the local councils with objections and cause havoc for planners. I agree with the top comment, this is spurious vaporware that's been ejaculated out of some government-affiliated think tank with no actual plan for feasibility, delivery or value.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > In the UK we have NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard) and BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody) who would besiege the local councils with objections and cause havoc for planners. I immediately had to think of Minions and their characteristic of well intentions disrupting their boss's plans when reading BANANAs... To get back to topic - here in Germany, we have introduced a special law, the "Maßnahmengesetz" [1], to bypass the usual permit processes and NIMBY/BANANA bullshit for twelve major infrastructure process. Basically, the law is explicitly saying that the projects in its scope are of major national/european importance, have been decided upon democratically and so do not need additional layers of checks and balances. Unfortunately, the EU Commission decided in all its glory that this idea of short-cutting the NIMBYs is a violation of EU law and so everything is under question again [2] [1] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/magvg/BJNR064000020.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/magvg/BJNR064000020.html [2] https://www.eurailpress.de/nachrichten/politik/detail/news/infrastrukturprojekte-eu-kommission-gegen-deutsches-beschleunigungsgesetz.html https://www.eurailpress.de/nachrichten/politik/detail/news/i...
    - 7952 4y ago
      The UK has a special arrangement for nationally significant infrastructure projects. They are decided by a public enquiry rather than local authorities and can use powers like compulsory purchase.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    If they're too dangerous to fly over public roads all the time it's problematic to put them over people and houses on private property instead. (Leaving aside noise issues.) I imagine drones will have their place to do urgent deliveries especially where there aren't roads. But they suffer from the same problem that other heavier than air craft do (e.g. flying cars), their failure mode is falling out of sky on top of things--even with safety systems like parachutes.
  - globular-toast 4y ago
    The trouble with the NIMBY/BANANA labels is it basically amounts to saying "you care about something I don't care about". I know it's hard to believe, but other people do have different interests than you.
- btbuildem 4y ago
  "Drones" in this context probably means more like "light unmanned fixed-wing aircraft" than quadcopters. Same type of machines that are used to drop bombs.
peanut_worm 4y ago
I wonder what effects this would have on the local bird populations
- dazc 4y ago
  Not a good one, I imagine. My drive to work each morning involves travelling on a stretch of rural road which is about 6 miles long with no boundaries stopping animals such as cows, horses and donkeys wandering into the path of speeding cars. The limit is 40mph but it's mostly ignored. As a consequence, around 40 such beasts are killed each year because the majority of people believe their need to drive at 20% above any given limit (for no other reason than satisfying their fragile egos) outweighs the lives and welfare of innocent animals. So who's going to care less for the lives of a few birds when delivery of random crap from amazon is given priority?
  - will0 4y ago
  - gadders 4y ago
    This is in the UK?
    - dazc 4y ago
      Yes https://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/19642710.speed-camera-campaign-roger-penny-way-new-forest/ https://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/19642710.speed-camera-campa...
      - gadders 4y ago
        Ah - slightly more rural than my part of the south east. I guess I see one deer every two years run over. The rest of the time it is mostly rabbits and badgers with the occasional fox. Hedgehogs not so much now they are rarer in the UK.
  - bowsamic 4y ago
wikfwikf 4y ago
This is vaporware. It's being announced by a lame duck government who want to point at something in the future and say the equivalent of 'I took steps to ... invent the internet'. If this actually consists of anything at all it is funding for a research project without commercial demand. Just announcing "we are giving free money to the arms industry so they don't have to pay for their own R&D" doesn't play well any more so it gets spun as part of The Future.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  My ex-boss is involved in the project to get organs delivered fast via drones that were basically just flying minifridges. This might be pretty useful for that.
  - martin_a 4y ago
    Is this (organ transport) really an unsolved issue that some kind of "drone highway" would solve? I doubt it.
    - EUROCARE 4y ago
      If you think transporting organs by car is a solution, then yeah, very much solved. But organs degrade every minute, so even a little speed up is very much worth it.
      - martin_a 4y ago
        Then get a helicopter. ;-)
        EUROCARE 4y ago
        I have a medical helicopter flying over my house roughly every second day and that's more than enough. If all the cars marked as "organ transport" that I see around here went by helicopter instead I wouldn't be able to hear my GF talking at home... And of course - the cost and emissions, and the inability to land at small fields... I don't see how a big, bulky, human-piloted helicopter could be in any way better than a specialized, lightweight unmanned vehicle.
mothsonasloth 4y ago
The Royal Mail drone scheme to the Western Isles of Scotland is much needed. Currently we depend on Loganair and other chartered flights to carry mail to remote islands in Scotland. This will enable deliveries more frequently and less dependant on the human factor, although weather will still be a limiting one. As a developer living on a remote island currently, its been amazing to see technology even as ubiquitous as 4G help fish farms, wind turbines and other communications work much better.
- callamdelaney 4y ago
  What if a drone crashes into the sea and loses all your mail, and say it was important?
  - jackdh 4y ago
    Likely the same as currently established means of delivery. Insurance.
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    Then the mail is in the sea.
  - neilalexander 4y ago
    The same thing that happens if a Loganair plane crashes into the sea.
    - callamdelaney 4y ago
      Significantly less likely than a drone.
  - BurningFrog 4y ago
    Floating waterproof delivery drones should be fairly simple to design, so I assume they already exist?
  - pjc50 4y ago
    Still a better delivery service than Hermes.
globular-toast 4y ago
No mention of how any lorries this will take off the roads. So what's this for? To make buying unnecessary shit from Amazon even cheaper? This just seems like a way to squeeze this small island even more. There's already barely anywhere you can go outside without any noise pollution. I guess we can say good bye to those places too.
- 7952 4y ago
  A lot of the UK is actually pretty empty. You can often go a couple miles of the main road and you barely see anyone for hours. Obviously that tranquillity is something that should be protected. But I don't think a few drones will change that. The big problem is that people are stuck in the busy areas and don't have good access to the empty bits.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    >But I don't think a few drones will change that. I don't expect many people will begrudge the occasional urgent medical delivery. What a lot of people don't want is the sky full of buzzing hardware delivering takeout burgers.
- corobo 4y ago
  > There's already barely anywhere you can go outside without any noise pollution Found the Londoner haha. 2 minutes from me is a walk where I can do an easy 6 miles without seeing or hearing anything but nature (maybe a few dog walkers). Even at that 6 mile mark it's just a lil village then more nature. Come up north if you're starving for silence! A lot of villages are connected by old railway lines (rails removed), they make for great peaceful walks. In any case I don't disagree with you. I do hope there's no stream of drones one day buzzing along, I might have to get into slingshottery.
  - globular-toast 4y ago
    I live in a small, boring town and regularly walk in the countryside. I think our definition of silence is different. Even in the north of the Peak District you'll get planes from Manchester airport. Everywhere else you'll hear loud cars/motorbikes from every direction. There are pockets of quiet, but it's very difficult to find true silence in Britain now. In any case, my point was really that these last few pockets are now at risk.
shapefrog 4y ago
If you watch the radar you notice patterns with helicopters over London - there are vary distinct routes in the sky that they follow. Along the thames, and along the M3 / M40. So seems an obvious extension of this sort of thing really. https://www.caa.co.uk/media/wppncpam/london-heli-route-chart.pdf https://www.caa.co.uk/media/wppncpam/london-heli-route-chart...
- alexpotato 4y ago
  This is also true in Manhattan post 9/11.
rich_sasha 4y ago
I suppose this is an extension of air space zoning, which is a thing already. The 3D space above our head is carved up into different bits, with different rules, optimised for the principal user. Rules around major airports are optimised for big airline jets, whereas rules around small rural airstrips are optimised for hobbyists. It makes sense to create more zones if there is a new use-case. Designated corridors for drones is basically sandboxing. That said, as a sibling comment says, this is coming from a government under liquidation, staffed by a party behind in polls - their objective probably isn't Making Airspace Great Again.
dan_pixelflow 4y ago
The UK loves the word 'superhighway'. They usually fail. We had 'cycle superhighways' in London, started while Livingstone was Mayor and then left to basically rot under Johnson's term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cycle_routes_in_London https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cycle_routes_in_London
lizardactivist 4y ago
Never before has such a small amount of infrastructure come at such a high price. Or perhaps they are building a big tube in the sky for the drones to fly through?

70 points by hanoz 4y ago

Monumentally stupid idea: as our "civilized world" devolves, these will be bored moron target practice, as well as perfect targets for commercial disruption. The short sightedness and immaturity of human society knows no bounds, it's a black hole.

pjc50 4y ago
> bored moron target practice With what? Remember this is the UK.

gumby 4y ago

This is a really good idea and I'm eager to see how it works out. Quadcopters can't fly that high and I think if they flew willy-nilly all over the place it would be a noise/privacy issue. Requiring "highways", say over the access roads of actual highways, would be a big win on many fronts.

mr_gibbins 4y ago
I think that would be problematic - there would be a significant proportion of downed drones, whether by mechanical failure, bird strike, overhead cables, bridges, battery outages, etc. It would be particularly dangerous for drivers to have random drone drops over highways. If we tried to site the highways elsewhere, how many people would complain about noise over their gardens or houses? How many enterprising people with slingshots would make a sport out of downing drones? In the UK we have NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard) and BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody) who would besiege the local councils with objections and cause havoc for planners. I agree with the top comment, this is spurious vaporware that's been ejaculated out of some government-affiliated think tank with no actual plan for feasibility, delivery or value.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > In the UK we have NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard) and BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody) who would besiege the local councils with objections and cause havoc for planners. I immediately had to think of Minions and their characteristic of well intentions disrupting their boss's plans when reading BANANAs... To get back to topic - here in Germany, we have introduced a special law, the "Maßnahmengesetz" [1], to bypass the usual permit processes and NIMBY/BANANA bullshit for twelve major infrastructure process. Basically, the law is explicitly saying that the projects in its scope are of major national/european importance, have been decided upon democratically and so do not need additional layers of checks and balances. Unfortunately, the EU Commission decided in all its glory that this idea of short-cutting the NIMBYs is a violation of EU law and so everything is under question again [2] [1] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/magvg/BJNR064000020.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/magvg/BJNR064000020.html [2] https://www.eurailpress.de/nachrichten/politik/detail/news/infrastrukturprojekte-eu-kommission-gegen-deutsches-beschleunigungsgesetz.html https://www.eurailpress.de/nachrichten/politik/detail/news/i...
  - 7952 4y ago
    The UK has a special arrangement for nationally significant infrastructure projects. They are decided by a public enquiry rather than local authorities and can use powers like compulsory purchase.
- ghaff 4y ago
  If they're too dangerous to fly over public roads all the time it's problematic to put them over people and houses on private property instead. (Leaving aside noise issues.) I imagine drones will have their place to do urgent deliveries especially where there aren't roads. But they suffer from the same problem that other heavier than air craft do (e.g. flying cars), their failure mode is falling out of sky on top of things--even with safety systems like parachutes.
- globular-toast 4y ago
  The trouble with the NIMBY/BANANA labels is it basically amounts to saying "you care about something I don't care about". I know it's hard to believe, but other people do have different interests than you.
btbuildem 4y ago
"Drones" in this context probably means more like "light unmanned fixed-wing aircraft" than quadcopters. Same type of machines that are used to drop bombs.

peanut_worm 4y ago

I wonder what effects this would have on the local bird populations

dazc 4y ago
Not a good one, I imagine. My drive to work each morning involves travelling on a stretch of rural road which is about 6 miles long with no boundaries stopping animals such as cows, horses and donkeys wandering into the path of speeding cars. The limit is 40mph but it's mostly ignored. As a consequence, around 40 such beasts are killed each year because the majority of people believe their need to drive at 20% above any given limit (for no other reason than satisfying their fragile egos) outweighs the lives and welfare of innocent animals. So who's going to care less for the lives of a few birds when delivery of random crap from amazon is given priority?
- will0 4y ago
- gadders 4y ago
  This is in the UK?
  - dazc 4y ago
    Yes https://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/19642710.speed-camera-campaign-roger-penny-way-new-forest/ https://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/19642710.speed-camera-campa...
    - gadders 4y ago
      Ah - slightly more rural than my part of the south east. I guess I see one deer every two years run over. The rest of the time it is mostly rabbits and badgers with the occasional fox. Hedgehogs not so much now they are rarer in the UK.
- bowsamic 4y ago

wikfwikf 4y ago

This is vaporware. It's being announced by a lame duck government who want to point at something in the future and say the equivalent of 'I took steps to ... invent the internet'. If this actually consists of anything at all it is funding for a research project without commercial demand. Just announcing "we are giving free money to the arms industry so they don't have to pay for their own R&D" doesn't play well any more so it gets spun as part of The Future.

robertlagrant 4y ago
My ex-boss is involved in the project to get organs delivered fast via drones that were basically just flying minifridges. This might be pretty useful for that.
- martin_a 4y ago
  Is this (organ transport) really an unsolved issue that some kind of "drone highway" would solve? I doubt it.
  - EUROCARE 4y ago
    If you think transporting organs by car is a solution, then yeah, very much solved. But organs degrade every minute, so even a little speed up is very much worth it.
    - martin_a 4y ago
      Then get a helicopter. ;-)
      - EUROCARE 4y ago
        I have a medical helicopter flying over my house roughly every second day and that's more than enough. If all the cars marked as "organ transport" that I see around here went by helicopter instead I wouldn't be able to hear my GF talking at home... And of course - the cost and emissions, and the inability to land at small fields... I don't see how a big, bulky, human-piloted helicopter could be in any way better than a specialized, lightweight unmanned vehicle.

mothsonasloth 4y ago

The Royal Mail drone scheme to the Western Isles of Scotland is much needed. Currently we depend on Loganair and other chartered flights to carry mail to remote islands in Scotland. This will enable deliveries more frequently and less dependant on the human factor, although weather will still be a limiting one. As a developer living on a remote island currently, its been amazing to see technology even as ubiquitous as 4G help fish farms, wind turbines and other communications work much better.

callamdelaney 4y ago
What if a drone crashes into the sea and loses all your mail, and say it was important?
- jackdh 4y ago
  Likely the same as currently established means of delivery. Insurance.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  Then the mail is in the sea.
- neilalexander 4y ago
  The same thing that happens if a Loganair plane crashes into the sea.
  - callamdelaney 4y ago
    Significantly less likely than a drone.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  Floating waterproof delivery drones should be fairly simple to design, so I assume they already exist?
- pjc50 4y ago
  Still a better delivery service than Hermes.

globular-toast 4y ago

No mention of how any lorries this will take off the roads. So what's this for? To make buying unnecessary shit from Amazon even cheaper? This just seems like a way to squeeze this small island even more. There's already barely anywhere you can go outside without any noise pollution. I guess we can say good bye to those places too.

7952 4y ago
A lot of the UK is actually pretty empty. You can often go a couple miles of the main road and you barely see anyone for hours. Obviously that tranquillity is something that should be protected. But I don't think a few drones will change that. The big problem is that people are stuck in the busy areas and don't have good access to the empty bits.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >But I don't think a few drones will change that. I don't expect many people will begrudge the occasional urgent medical delivery. What a lot of people don't want is the sky full of buzzing hardware delivering takeout burgers.
corobo 4y ago
> There's already barely anywhere you can go outside without any noise pollution Found the Londoner haha. 2 minutes from me is a walk where I can do an easy 6 miles without seeing or hearing anything but nature (maybe a few dog walkers). Even at that 6 mile mark it's just a lil village then more nature. Come up north if you're starving for silence! A lot of villages are connected by old railway lines (rails removed), they make for great peaceful walks. In any case I don't disagree with you. I do hope there's no stream of drones one day buzzing along, I might have to get into slingshottery.
- globular-toast 4y ago
  I live in a small, boring town and regularly walk in the countryside. I think our definition of silence is different. Even in the north of the Peak District you'll get planes from Manchester airport. Everywhere else you'll hear loud cars/motorbikes from every direction. There are pockets of quiet, but it's very difficult to find true silence in Britain now. In any case, my point was really that these last few pockets are now at risk.

shapefrog 4y ago

If you watch the radar you notice patterns with helicopters over London - there are vary distinct routes in the sky that they follow. Along the thames, and along the M3 / M40. So seems an obvious extension of this sort of thing really. https://www.caa.co.uk/media/wppncpam/london-heli-route-chart.pdf https://www.caa.co.uk/media/wppncpam/london-heli-route-chart...

alexpotato 4y ago
This is also true in Manhattan post 9/11.

rich_sasha 4y ago

I suppose this is an extension of air space zoning, which is a thing already. The 3D space above our head is carved up into different bits, with different rules, optimised for the principal user. Rules around major airports are optimised for big airline jets, whereas rules around small rural airstrips are optimised for hobbyists. It makes sense to create more zones if there is a new use-case. Designated corridors for drones is basically sandboxing. That said, as a sibling comment says, this is coming from a government under liquidation, staffed by a party behind in polls - their objective probably isn't Making Airspace Great Again.

dan_pixelflow 4y ago

The UK loves the word 'superhighway'. They usually fail. We had 'cycle superhighways' in London, started while Livingstone was Mayor and then left to basically rot under Johnson's term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cycle_routes_in_London https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cycle_routes_in_London

lizardactivist 4y ago

Never before has such a small amount of infrastructure come at such a high price. Or perhaps they are building a big tube in the sky for the drones to fly through?