> What happens when a half pound drone that's going 15+ kph hits an oncoming car windshield going many times that speed?
My intuition says the drone would bounce off, being made of light material. In the worst case, it would crack the windshield and the driver would stop.
> what happens when you distract those drives with an aerial nuisance
Many people look at birds while driving with little notable effect. It feels like the distracting-traffic argument is really just a couching of the real gripe, which is more like "weird new thing bad".
> Things don't have to be universally safe to point out a safety flaw with a specific variable
Sure, but we can compare relative safety. It's a bit odd to pick on a slightly-unsafe activity due to its proximity to a much unsafer activity. In general anything involving an urban landscape is going to have traffic/buildings/infrastructure adjacent. And so if we go by a standard of possibly affecting those things, there would end up being no permission for anything new.
My intuition says the drone would bounce off, being made of light material. In the worst case, it would crack the windshield and the driver would stop.
> what happens when you distract those drives with an aerial nuisance
Many people look at birds while driving with little notable effect. It feels like the distracting-traffic argument is really just a couching of the real gripe, which is more like "weird new thing bad".
> Things don't have to be universally safe to point out a safety flaw with a specific variable
Sure, but we can compare relative safety. It's a bit odd to pick on a slightly-unsafe activity due to its proximity to a much unsafer activity. In general anything involving an urban landscape is going to have traffic/buildings/infrastructure adjacent. And so if we go by a standard of possibly affecting those things, there would end up being no permission for anything new.