Waymos are rolling. Amazon’s Zoox are testing too. And soon, AI-powered services in Denver probably won’t be limited to the roads — drone delivery is also on the way.
Story By and Image Credit: Havalin Haskell
www.cpr.org
Next year, Coloradans could look up and see the autonomous drones delivering Walmart orders to doorsteps. But as drone delivery takes off, cities are busy trying to figure out how much control they have over the technology.
Walmart announced plans to partner with Wing, a drone operator owned by Google parent company Alphabet, to launch drone delivery in the Denver area in 2027.
“Walmart’s stores put everyday items close to the communities we serve, and Wing helps bring those items to customers’ homes in minutes,” said Greg Cathey, senior vice president of eCommerce Transformation for Walmart, in a release.
Wing’s drones can fly up to 60 mph and carry packages weighing up to five pounds. The companies say the drones can deliver thousands of items in under 30 minutes. Walmart has five stores within Denver city limits, but it has not said which locations will offer drone delivery.
Cities have lots of questions, including how tied their hands are when it comes to oversight of delivery drones. That’s because the Federal Aviation Administration has full regulatory authority over the devices once they leave the ground.
The Walmart and Wing drone partnership in Denver must follow FAA rules that treat them like a digital airline, requiring special commercial carrier certificates to fly automatically. They must also use advanced tracking technology and conduct noise reviews to safely fly miles away into suburban neighborhoods without crashing into other aircraft or disturbing residents.
But cities still have some authority over what happens on the ground. One Colorado city, Northglenn, is using those powers to try to put its own rules in place before drone delivery arrives.
Northglenn grapples with what it can regulate
State lawmakers attempted to craft state and local rules on “unmanned aircraft systems” which would have given local governments some regulatory guidelines. But that attempt was ultimately unsuccessful after a bill died in the State Senate this year. Northglenn is the first city in the region to try to draft their own commercial regulations through land-use laws.
Northglenn Mayor Meredith Leighty said Walmart has approached the city council with plans to operate drone delivery to customers from their local store. She said that Walmart hasn’t initiated a drone delivery rollout in Northglenn yet, but since it is likely on the horizon for many cities, the council wanted to get ahead of it.
“There’s very little that we have control over, but we wanted to make sure that we had some things in place before the first application because we know that technology is changing and it’s changing quickly,” she said. “We just wanted to get in front of it.”
In a city council meeting on September 21, Becky Smith, the city’s planning director, presented a draft ordinance that uses the city’s land use powers to define “use-specific standards” for commercial drone delivery hubs. Those regulations would limit where such hubs can operate, hours they can operate and how much noise they can emit. As far as airspace goes, much of what the drones can do in the air is out of their hands.
“The airspace is completely governed by the FAA and so there’s only so many things that we can do,” said Leighty. “So we can manage things like time of day that they’re operating or noise levels or distance from homes.”
The proposed rules state that any drone launch site needs to be at least 200-feet from homes and schools, as well as to be screened or fenced from public right-of-ways. Flights would also be restricted to operating from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. and noise would not be allowed to exceed 65 decibels at the property line.
Leighty said the city council is hoping to vote on the proposed regulations by the end of the month.
Walmart and Wing also approached Castle Rock and Parker. Both towns have passed the state’s first temporary bans on drone delivery to buy time to figure out how to navigate the impacts of commercial drones in their communities.
Leighty explained that Northglenn didn’t want to ban drone delivery outright for fear of taking an economic hit.
“Hypothetically, if Thornton says we are going to allow drone delivery, but Northglenn’s Walmart won’t, then our residents are likely to be spending their tax dollars in Thorton and we want to make sure that we’re competitors for sales tax revenue,” she said.
Denver has not released a statement or any similar proposed regulations yet.
Wing drones are already making deliveries in Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and Orlando. Walmart and Wing want to build a network of more than 270 drone-delivery locations they say could reach more than 40 million Americans next year.
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