EP 56: The Best Food Delivery Ever
We revisit the intersection of drones, local government and public need with a trip to Holly Springs, North Carolina, a small town innovating nationally with a pilot project to see commercial food delivery by way of drone. As you can imagine, it's stuffed with logistical and policy questions. Sushi delivery in Iceland https://youtu.be/fPGzv9V3Vcg Holly Springs press release https://www.hollyspringsnc.us/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=848 Timeline, "Forget self-driving car anxiety: In the early days human drivers were the fear" https://timeline.com/forget-self-driving-car-anxiety-in-the-early-days-human-drivers-were-the-fear-55a770262c10 NCDOT Launches 'First Flight' in Drone Pilot Program https://www.ncdot.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/2018/2018-08-29-drone-program-partnership.aspx Municipal Equation Episode 13, "Drones and Local Government" https://municipalequation.libsyn.com/ep-13-drones-and-local-government
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Transcript
On this episode of Municipal Equation. Yeah. The next twenty years of aviation, you're gonna see more development than we have in the past hundred and fifteen years.
How bizarre is that?
Of Municipalities, episode 56. What you're hearing right now is a sushi delivery. Some folks ordered a meal delivery. They wanted sushi and it's coming to them right now
and they're stoked. Is watches gonna release it from there?
They actually have their smartphones out recording video of it. What they're witnessing is a drone flying fairly high overhead. A hatch opens up beneath it and a winch begins lowering the sushi down to this group of people who can't believe what they're seeing.
That is unbelievable, isn't it? How bizarre is that?
They get their sushi and then the winch winds back up and the drone flies off. Yay. That was in Reykjavik, Iceland. The footage got published online just one month ago by a company called Flytrax, which right now is working with a small town in North Carolina in conjunction with the federal government and the state DOT on a pilot project that could plot the future for how we, in The United States, get our sushi. Just kidding, this is about the future of interaction between us people and drones. All kinds of possibilities. And we've long discussed things like package delivery. What this pilot project will focus on with Flytrex and the town of Holly Springs, is meal delivery by drone. Which looking at it from the outside, is stuffed with logistical and policy questions. So I went out there last week to talk with the guy who knows the most about it. Hey. How are you? Ben Rowley Municipalities. I'm here to see Aaron Lovett. Yeah. Thank you, Bob. Hey. Hi, Aaron. How you doing? Good. Yeah. Good to see you. Just so I get this part right, could you state your name and what you do, where you work, all that, just to how you you would introduce yourself in this
context. Sure. My name is Aaron Levitt, and I'm the assistant director of engineering for the town of Holly Springs located in Wake County, North Carolina.
And just to get a sense of, you know, what kind of town Holly Springs is, population, sort of demographics, industry, you know, where are we right now?
So I'd say we're we're a transitioning, town. We were about in the low thousands, you know, one or 2,000 in in the nineties. Since then, we've boomed. Right now, I think we're about 36 or 37,000. So we're located in Wake County, one of the fastest growing counties in the state, and then I also think one of the fastest growing counties in the country. I know Wake County gets about 70 people moving into it each day. So as far as industry, we have some pharmaceutical. It's one of our big big businesses in town. And so kinda
inching toward what we're here to talk about today. Does the town have a a character or reputation or a craving anyway to be experimental, innovative, the first to do something? I mean, I guess everybody in a sense could say that, but,
what's the what's the tone? I mean, I think we're always trying to be innovative. It's it's tough these days to really be the first. I mean, I think that the drone program is really, you know, the closest we've been to being the first in the country. So here's a rundown of the drone program.
It's a three year pilot with Flytrax, which is an Israeli start up. Pending regulatory approval, they want to be the first to operate with drone delivery in Holly Springs. Before the end of the year, that's the hope. Beginning with take out delivery from a local restaurant to a nearby neighborhood, where the delivery boy is a drone, and then slowly and safely expand as things go well. But, starting out, they're adhering to existing FAA regulations, that restrict flights to daytime. The drone has to be within a line of sight of the operator, and they're not going to fly directly over people. Pretty limited, but the project could play into a softening of those limitations. Again, if things go well, And obviously, a different set of regulations could mean a whole lot for possibility when it comes to drone application. State government is also a party here. So, a lot of regulatory checkpoints and eyeballs. It's nothing unraveling off the radar. To quote from a press release the town put out, Yareeth Basch, the CEO of Flytrax says he hopes it'll demonstrate the social, environmental, and economic benefits of airborne delivery. He says, the FAA's initiative signals a palpable shift in the acceptance of drones as the future of on demand delivery. And we're proud to be working with them and with Holly Springs to help make this vision take off.
Back to Aaron Levitt. In late twenty seventeen, there's an executive order, to create this pilot program which would incorporate drones into the national airspace. And, you know, with with a few things being paramount, and that's obviously safety, public outreach is huge. So this program was created by the FAA. It was created quickly. I think there was a month from when they created it to when the primary applications were due. And we met up with this company called Flytrex. It was actually they approached me and they were I investigated them immediately and they were responsible for the first consumer delivery drone program in the world in Reykjavik, Iceland. So I started getting kind of excited about that and talked to the town manager and town administration throughout the process of applying. And they had supported me, I think, naively thinking that nothing would come of this. You know, like, sure, Aaron. Go ahead and do your drone thing. The FAA received over 150 primary applications, and they announced I think originally they were planning only to pick five, but the they were so amazed by I guess the, the response that they decided to go with 10 different sites. Yeah it's interesting to see that there's so there are a few sites that are doing package delivery but not all of them. San Diego's one, Virginia's doing some package delivery stuff with Alphabet, Google's parent company. But yeah the details on the other programs are kind of limited at this point. For us a bit, you know, the FAA put it out there that a big part of it was citizen outreach, public outreach. So I'm taking that on, for the town of Holly Springs. And it's challenging. I mean, you know, it's tough to go in front of town council and talk about drones flying over people's houses and delivering food, and, you know, it's a it's a lot of information to to swallow.
Agenda item seven, seven a. The fly tracks will provide details about the Holly Springs program. That'll be one of the first, in the nation to provide drone delivery and Aaron Levitt and Flytrex is on.
Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem and town council. This is the August 7 Holly Springs town council meeting. Aaron steps up to the podium, basically says, yeah, there might be some concerns with this, but we've been here before. The nation and the world are in the middle of a transportation revolution.
Technology has advanced to a point where autonomy, connected vehicles, and aerospace engineering are combining to form the next generation of transportation. In order to move forward, it is a good idea to look and see where we came from. The country has successfully navigated a transportation revolution before, namely the transition from horse and buggies to motorized vehicles. As you can imagine, the transition from horses to motor vehicles had its own challenges and solutions. Motor vehicles were large, loud, fast, and scary. People were concerned about these mysterious new machines. During the late nineteenth century, so called red flag laws were enacted that would aid in the transition.
So what are these red flag laws? I'm gonna source a website called Timeline. It's a website that highlights points of history and sort of weaves them into today's context. They had a piece on red flag laws a while back and these laws well, basically according to Timeline, in the early days of the self propelled carriage being a car, in many areas someone had to walk in front of it, in front of the car, waving a red flag to warn people that a car was coming. Let me say that again. If a car was coming down the street, the driver of that car needed someone walking in front of it waving a red flag for that travel to be legal, which is to say the car traveled at walking speed. Timeline quotes an 1895 piece in the New York Times that pointed out the obvious. The red flag law kind of defeated the purpose. Apparently, the law was written for locomotives, but led into the early days of horseless vehicles on public streets. But the real takeaway here is that we had to regulate our way into comfort with this transformative, scary new technology.
Now imagine trying to create or run a successful trucking company with these kinds of restrictions and inefficiencies. Imagine the frustration of not being able to drive your vehicle faster than a person could walk. Today, the drone industry is operating under similar restrictions to the red flag laws. Don't get me wrong. These laws are not intended to hold back the industry or slow progress. They're actually necessary to successfully transition from one technology to another. Technologies rarely exist in isolation. Even today, there are few remote locations in America where mail is still delivered by horse. Like the red flag laws from the eighteen nineties transformed drone regulations will be changing, thus allowing us to take advantage of these new technologies. The FAA pilot program and Holly Springs involvement on the NCDOT team is one of the initial steps in the journey to create the future of transportation.
Aaron goes on to tell the town council how drones are energy efficient, fast, and way safer and simpler to control than people realize. He's a long time drone operator himself, and the town does have its own drone that it uses for various municipal functions. We've covered those on the podcast before, but as we've also covered on the podcast before, drones are still pretty far from 100% of public comfort. And when Holly Springs announced its role in this pilot project, people started talking. Here's Holly Springs council member, Sherry Lee.
A lot of the feedback I've received has been, pretty apprehensive. And most of it is, not knowing about drones and them being fairly new. For instance, the upper limit property ownership, you know, your airspace, how far up does it go? And more so just the intrusiveness. Mhmm. So I do ask that when you do start meeting with community and the more you come to us, that there's much information you can give on those things. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I think we all know you can't photograph without permission, things like that, and some of that other stuff. But when there's really no restriction on airspace unless you have a, you know, 500 foot building,
that's what I think a lot of the, concern comes in. Aaron said most of the feedback he's seen online has been overwhelmingly positive. But just to kinda encapsulate the fears that people have.
You know, we've gotten emails from people, that are concerned, and I totally understand why they're concerned. I think it's mostly due to just lack of knowledge. People don't understand what these drones are. I think a lot of people think they're toys. They're something that their nephew got for Christmas that they flew and and blew over the house, and they never saw it again. I've heard that story many times. A lot of people tell us that they're gonna shoot our drones down. One person described it as a skeet shooting with a reward. So I thought that was pretty funny. Wow.
Yeah. And are they concerned with is it public safety or is it, like, the government spying on us or is it, I mean, I guess it's gotta be all that. Yeah. So we've had a little bit of everything. So Flytrex, the company that we're working with,
had a really, eloquent solution to the the the the spying, and they just took the took the cameras off the drones. So that really is easy one to answer there. There's no cameras on the drones. The drones do upload their flight data, so their position, their heading. So that information gets information gets uploaded to kind of the cloud situation, kind of a black box that's not on the actual drone. But so that data is available. But no, people are people are concerned about failure, you know, drone failure. And I think that's a realistic concern. But when you understand that these aren't the $1,500 drones you can buy at the store, these are industrial level drones. They have multiple levels of redundancy built into them. There's backup batteries. The drones have six propellers and they could operate safely with four or five, you know, so they could have engine failures and still not fall. Worst case scenario, you get a drone that does lose engines or enough to make you know, it's it's coming down. The drones are equipped with parachutes, so the parachute would deploy, the engines cut, so the propeller stops spinning, and then, yeah, there's a loud beeping noise. So you can hear it coming. Yeah. This is good info. Yeah. And I think when people think about it is they don't realize what you're what we're doing is we're not just looking at a drone flying. We're looking at taking a row a car off the road. You're talking about a 3,000 pound metal object driving down your street within feet of your your sidewalks by a human being. Maybe someone is texting or, you know, there's forty thousand vehicle deaths every year. We're talking about replacing one of those 3,000 pound vehicles with a 35 pound vehicle that's flown on a predetermined route to a predetermined location. So I think you really have to compare the two. For every drone that we're we're using, there's gonna be one less vehicle on the the streets. So I think the the safety equation there is a a net positive safety gain.
So if you think about the nature of competition, like with autonomous vehicles, there are so many companies angling to be the first and the best. Meaning, they don't want accidents or anything to set them all back with public acceptance and proof that these technologies are good. And, yes, bad things have happened with autonomous vehicles. But competition means you've got all these companies working quickly, yes, but for the sake of permanence. That's the goal anyway. And so reflecting on what Aaron just said about the greater good, there's potentially a lot ahead for the application of drones in our lives, and surely in many ways that we haven't even thought about yet. But let's talk about food. That's where we are in Holly Springs, and they see it as the right baby step. So how specifically would this work? Like, I'm hungry. I want sushi. I need it quick. I'm gonna get a drone on this. Like like, how would that work exactly? Here's Wes Shover. He works for FlyTrax, and he explained it to the Holly Springs Town Council. So I'll walk through the the process of ordering. So,
ultimately, you have an online ordering app, kinda like a grubhub. You go and you find your favorite restaurant or your favorite food that you wanna have ordered. You pick it, you select, hey, I'd like a drone delivery and I wanna pick this delivery location that's predefined. You place the order, no cash is exchanged at all through the app. You get an instant notification that your order is, you know, you have a time to delivery. The minute the drone takes off, you get a notification that the drone is en route, and you have a time for delivery and it's en route. So you go to the location, it will stay there for a minute and a half, you have to initiate delivery, for it to lower. So that's how we control that the person that ordered it is actually receiving the goods. Okay. So it has to be initiated by the person. So that's why community involvement is gonna be really big because the first delivery location is hopefully gonna be near a residential area and ultimately those are the people that should potentially order. So we have to have engagement from that community to prove that we can deliver. So, you know, public engagement, it's really important to us, because if we don't have to buy in, then we don't have people ordering. And and we really have to walk through kind of that process and see how effective it is and and prove that it's faster, quicker, and,
cheaper too. Much, much cheaper. So if you caught it, right now they're not talking about drones dropping tacos right on your front porch. There will be a specific pickup site near to where the customer lives. Ideally, things will go so well with this pilot project that it expands and tries new things, crawling toward the most efficient a to b way of ordering and delivery.
This is kind of just a concept for you guys to see that it's very, very short distances, not over, large residential areas or, publicly, you know, traveled areas and then predetermined. So would the residents have to sign a waiver or some type of documentation to to accept that? Yes. So that was if we were delivering their backyards. But ultimately, if if that's what it takes to get a public meeting with just the residents of this area, yeah, for sure. We'll definitely have a, a meeting with them. You know, whatever it takes.
Takes. It is a very dynamic, program. The FAA has been great. NCDOT is really spearheading this whole thing. But we're hoping to get testing started before the end of the year. We're really looking to take a walk, a crawl, walk, run approach to the whole program. So step one is gonna be, you know, delivery from a location to a location that is actually within line of sight. So, you know, we're just really looking to take baby steps, get people comfortable, get people understanding how it works. And then from there, you know, expanding those operations, adding more delivery locations. So right now we're looking at one delivery location. I think phase two or phase three would be adding a few more, maybe delivering to neighborhoods in central locations. And then, you know, one day, hopefully, delivering to, like, people's front yards or the backyards.
Wes from FlyTrax told the town council to imagine the local positives of that. So the the local impact, right, today,
drones can only fly four to five miles. So that that enables us to utilize localized, shopping centers and local businesses, bringing that business and increasing the capability for these businesses to reach additional consumers. So, ultimately, the long goal is, that small businesses can be able to reach more consumers in suburban areas. So instead of people having to travel across town to visit their favorite restaurant, they can order it and it can be to their house in four to five minutes. So it allows local small businesses to reach more customers. It's also eco friendly, so you're pulling off, delivery drivers, from the road. So instead of driving a two ton vehicle, for eight hours a day and doing two to three deliveries, you're an hour, you're doing four to five deliveries with a completely electric vehicle. It's much faster. You're not having another car on the road, so it helps with traffic and congestion.
Some of the talk among council members turned to other possibilities, like delivery of medication and so on. The same day I interviewed Aaron, right at the August, the state DOT put out a press release with the lead drone based medical deliveries are here. So WakeMed, which is a healthcare provider based in Wake County, North Carolina, They were partnered with the DOT in this pilot project. They did their first test flights for drones to carry medical packages. A drone would carry these packages from a medical park across the way from WakeMed to a tower at the hospital. So it's not the same thing as dropping your pills at your front door yet, but the press release quoted a doctor at WakeMed saying This powerful technology has the potential to achieve transformative improvements in health and health care delivery.
You know, where is this headed? Where is this headed next? And what is this program, this pilot program, the beginning of? And I talked a little bit more about the UTM. I think it all boils down to the UTM, unmanned traffic management. And that's not just your 35 pound drone delivering medicine or pizza or whatever. You're looking at a whole new sort of line of transportation called urban air mobility. I was at the NC drone summit this past month. We had some man by the name or the nickname of PK from NASA talked about, you know, the next twenty years of aviation, you're gonna see more development than we have in the past hundred and fifteen years. You know, so and it's all gonna be based on this UTM, this ecosystem of drones flying next to, you know, your your your little personal drone that's manned that you hop into and and zip over to work, you know, it sounds crazy to talk about. It really does. It's I always say it sounds like we're in the prequel to the Jetsons. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, I think it's gonna happen. You you look at the country and the globe, the Earth, we're we're growing exponentially. There's more people, more people in cities. We still have to get around. Mhmm. Something has to happen. Something's gonna happen. I mean, honestly, I think in the next, and this is a wild prediction, but I think in the next five to ten years, you're gonna start pissing people having their own personal drones that they send off to go pick up the groceries. You know? Or I'm gonna send my drone to, you know, the store and and get my dry cleaning or whatever. Yes. It does sound crazy. You know, we need to improve what we have instead of just adding more lanes and widening the roads. You know, we just can't keep on going like that. It's not sustainable. Road projects are expensive. They're They take forever. Yeah, they take forever. We do a lot of road work around here. It's tough to get contractors to build roads these days. There's so many challenges with just the old techniques.
We'll keep monitoring this program as it takes off. Wanna give a big thanks to Aaron Levitt with the town of Holly Springs for taking the time to explain all this to us. We actually talked for a long time, and I walked away with a lot of valuable information, too much to fit inside an episode of this podcast. But again, we'll be following this program as it plays out, and clearly, we'll have to do an update. If you listeners have any questions, things that I failed to cover here or address, please send along to bbrown nclm dot org. Again, my name is Ben Brown. The email is bbrown nclm dot org. Or just hit me up on Twitter. The handle is muniequation. I mentioned earlier that we did an episode looking at other ways that municipalities are using drones to improve service and accuracy of data and so on. And that was episode 13 from December 2016. It's a good primer, I guess. I'll put a link to that in the show notes with this episode at municipalequation.libsyn.com. Obviously, some of the information has changed already since December 2016 regarding drones and how they're being applied, but it's still a good primer. Again, municipalequation.libsyn.com. That's where you can find all of the past episodes, or just remember nclm.0rg/municipalequation, or just make it easy and subscribe on your podcast app. That way every new episode will just come to you, and we'd love a friendly review if you've enjoyed this podcast. Thanks again for listening. It's been a couple weeks, I guess, or a few weeks actually lot of projects and a lot of big stuff happening, so the podcast kind of had to sit on the back burner for a sec, but I've got a lot of episodes in the can, so stay tuned. There's a lot ahead. Municipal Equation is a podcast from the North Carolina League of Municipalities online at nclm.org. My name is Ben Brown. Thanks for listening.
