Residents of the Town of Christiansburg, which made history in 2019 as the first place in the country to have residential drone delivery, have overwhelmingly given their approval to the project in a survey that began last Thanksgiving.
The survey’s 20 questions were designed to measure how Christiansburg’s 22,000 residents felt about drone delivery. This was the first time that this question had ever been posed to a community that had actually experienced the service.
The survey was developed and conducted by researchers from the Virginia Tech Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership (MAAP), a federally designated drone test site, and Lee Vinsel, an assistant professor of science, technology, and society in Virginia Tech’s College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences.
The primary finding was that 87 percent of the people who responded to the survey reported that they liked the idea of drone delivery. The resoundingly positive results, published in the spring issue of Issues in Science and Technology, plant a new stake in the ground for the future of a technology still at the beginning of its transition from research to retail.
The service in Christiansburg, run by Wing, Alphabet’s drone-delivery subsidiary, is the most advanced of the handful of trial services operating today. But drone technology and the laws that regulate it are maturing, and it’s expected that services like these could become routine in the next few years.
Whether they’re successful or not will depend in large part on how the public responds. Delivering packages to homes unfolds in the public eye to a greater extent than many other applications for drones. People may see the drone in the commercial area where it picks up its cargo, at the customer’s house, and in the neighborhoods in between.
Accurate estimates of public opinion are critical for the regulatory agencies developing rules that will govern its use and state and local governments considering whether to encourage it in addition to the companies pioneering these services and hoping to scale their businesses.
Until now, though, data has been limited, and usually not encouraging: The handful of surveys on this topic have pegged public support for drone delivery at around 50 percent in the U.S. and lower in Europe and the United Kingdom.
But several factors suggest that those anemic results might not be definitive.
First, these surveys polled people who had almost certainly never received a delivery by drone, and who were speculating about a service they were imagining rather than reporting on one they’d experienced. Second, many of the survey questions were framed in a way that implies risk, asking respondents to rate their level of concern about potential problems selected by the researchers in advance..
Christiansburg thus represented a unique research opportunity.
“Gauging people’s reactions to new technologies can be really difficult, partly because it’s so easy to bias respondents’ views,” Vinsel said. “We wanted to create a survey that was as neutral as possible to examine sentiments about drone delivery. And Christiansburg was a great opportunity for us because it was a unique population that had actually experienced these systems.”
The survey asked respondents about standard demographic factors and their typical response to new technologies. It asked about how familiar they were with drone delivery, how they had found out about it, and what their general attitude toward it was. Instead of asking about specific risks and benefits, the researchers asked open-ended questions about what the respondents saw as positive and negative aspects of the technology.
The results were resoundingly positive.
Not only did 87 percent of respondents report positive sentiment about drone delivery, but 89 percent indicated either that they were likely to use the service or already had, and 49 percent reported liking the idea of drones used for package delivery more than drones used for other purposes.
The survey also asked respondents if their opinion had changed since the pandemic. When COVID-19 hit Virginia in March, the number of people signing up for Wing’s service and ordering drone deliveries spiked.
The pandemic popped up frequently in the open-ended question about positive aspects of the technology. Fifty-eight percent of Christiansburg survey respondents said that their opinion of drone delivery had improved, a much bigger boost than was measured in a 2020 survey from the Consumer Technology Association that polled a general population sample.
Here again, Christiansburg residents’ experience with drone delivery may have contributed to the jump. Seeing a favorite coffee shop find a new way to reach customers without in-person shopping or a neighbor’s child receiving a delivery of sidewalk chalk and crackers may resonate more than an abstract appreciation for contact-free delivery.
“The key thing is that speculation about technologies is different from actual experiences with them,” Vinsel said. “Lots of factors influence how we feel about the technologies in our lives, but something scholars have found repeatedly over for the last 60 years is that familiarity breeds acceptance. To be at an early point in the rollout of this technology and to be able to study a population that has actually experienced it is pretty exciting.”
