Hot Take
By Mariel Garza
I read a story in the New York Times yesterday that sent chills down my spine. And no, it was not about El Niño, or the DoorDash driver shot by ICE in Texas, or the war in Iran, or even AI.
No, the story was about a subject that mostly flies under the radar: Amazon’s new drone delivery service, and how its rollout is driving the residents of a Dallas suburb a little nuts. The noise from these unmanned vehicles flying as low as 150 feet to deliver smallish packages for 13 hours a day, every day, has disrupted the relative peace and quiet of the residents of this town.
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“We hear them zoom, zoom, zoom, back and forth from morning until past dinnertime,” one resident, Nikki Anderson, told the New York Times.
Amazon says it's planning to roll out the same service in 500 cities by the end of this year. At least one of them is in California: Tracy, a city in San Joaquin County that has become a major warehouse distribution center because of its proximity to the San Francisco Bay Area.
It’s only a matter of time before the drones from Amazon and other delivery companies start serving the population-rich areas of the Bay Area and Southern California.
Yes, drone delivery has certain environmental benefits. They are electric and enticingly fast, offering delivery in as little as 30 minutes. But once you hear them passing by, you may yearn for the slower gas-powered trucks rumbling down the street: At 70 to 90 decibels, they register a noise level between a vacuum cleaner and leaf blower.
Chronic noise pollution at this level is hazardous. According to UCLA Health, it raises stress levels and releases cortisol, and it increases anxiety and the risk of various cardiac diseases and cognitive impairments. And that’s to say nothing of the impact on local birds, which can disrupt their nesting and feeding and kill them in collisions. What happens to the many red-tailed hawks and hummingbirds that call my neighborhood home once drones start buzzing around?
Golden State staff
And for what? Deli ham for a sandwich (true story)? Toilet paper because you don’t feel like running to the grocery store? How much of the stuff we regularly order on Amazon is urgent enough to warrant a 30-minute delivery?
I know this sounds like a small gripe, and it is at least for the moment. But drone delivery has a common root with so many modern ills: humanity’s addiction to convenience.
When California banned the environmental menace that is plastic grocery bags, the biggest complaint was about convenience. The reluctance to move to electric cars is about convenience. When communities balk at new housing construction or street safety improvements, the arguments are usually about inconvenience. Indeed, Amazon itself became a near retail monopoly because it made ordering online so quick and convenient.
And what’s been the main contribution to humanity from AI, which experts tell us may kill us all? Convenience.
Dan Morain
Noted, With Comment
By Paul Thornton
In the ni-kñow: Kelvin wave, jet stream, thermocline – if you don’t know any of these terms as a historically strong El Niño brews in the Pacific Ocean, prompting Gov. Gavin Newsom to issue a statewide emergency declaration, Jessica Garrison has you covered at L.A. Material.
Prop. 40 gets white-boarded: Katie Porter, the former Democratic House member from Orange County who ran for governor in the primary, warns that the Proposition 40 billionaire tax is no progressive panacea. Among other drawbacks, she writes in the San Francisco Chronicle, there’s no guarantee that the revenue raised for healthcare won’t go to insurance companies.
The Bee endorses Prop. 40: It isn’t perfect, but it’s the chance voters have right now to backfill disastrous cuts to healthcare spending in California, writes The Sacramento Bee’s lame duck editorial board. (Every member of that editorial board was recently laid off, as former Bee columnist Robin Epley wrote last week in Golden State.)
Mariel Garza
A "no-brainer" bond measure: That would be Proposition 37, says Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton, because it would establish a home loan program for middle-class buyers and expand the supply of housing without costing taxpayers. He’s less sure about Proposition 1, the $11.25-billion affordable housing measure, and he rejects Proposition 38, the $8.4-billion research bond. (I wrote extensively about these three measures and how I am voting on them; here’s the piece on Propositions 1 and 37, and here’s my analysis of Proposition 38.)
Newsom’s busy pen: CalMatters columnist Dan Walters notes that the governor tacked to the right by vetoing bills on pension reform, environmental regulations and office-work requirements for state employees. But he also signed seven bills regulating data centers – a political hot topic, especially on the left – into law, including one that closely resembles legislation he vetoed last year requiring these facilities to report water use.
UC and the SAT: Miriam Pawel, the author of a forthcoming book on the University of California system, pans calls to bring back standardized testing for freshman admissions to UC in a New York Times essay: “To reinstate the SAT is to follow the pack rather than to lead, to grasp at a dubious shortcut rather than tackle more intractable underlying issues, chief among them the reality that the best public university in the country relies on one of the weakest, most inequitable public school systems.” In a piece for Golden State, longtime education journalist Karin Klein took the opposite position.
Wild Art
