Public Acceptance of the Use of Drones in City Logistics: A Citizen-Centric Perspective

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper contributes to understand the interaction between public knowledge, awareness and engagement with drones in city logistics.

May be before the sentence in line 32, a zoom on the problem of last miles delivery could be detailed for increasing the quality of the paper.

I don’t understand the sentence line 57, it could be nice to improve it.

Good introduction.

Good literature review.

May be at the end of the section 2 a synthesis for showing how the literature review will potentially contribute to the proposition presented in this paper.   

Before section 3 the global methodology has to be presented. I suppose that you have decided to use the quantitative method. A paragraph or a section for explaining this methodology could increase the paper quality.

A specific section on the methodology of description of the interaction between public knowledge, awareness and engagement with drones.

Author Response

Replies to Q1:

1. (x)English language and style are fine/minor spell check required

The paper was revised by an English native professional reviewer

2. May be before the sentence in line 32, a zoom on the problem of last miles delivery could be detailed for increasing the quality of the paper.

Authors inserted the suggested content in a new dedicated paragraph.

3. I don’t understand the sentence line 57, it could be nice to improve it.

Authors clarified the sentence.

4. May be at the end of the section 2 a synthesis for showing how the literature review will potentially contribute to the proposition presented in this paper.

Authors inserted the suggested content.

5. Before section 3 the global methodology has to be presented. I suppose that you have decided to use the quantitative method. A paragraph or a section for explaining this methodology could increase the paper quality.

Authors inserted the suggested content on the form of a new section.

6. A specific section on the methodology of description of the interaction between public knowledge, awareness and engagement with drones.

Authors inserted the suggested content

Authors also clarified all the sections where there was possibility for improvements. Further changes will be performed to reply to other reviewers.

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper covers a topic area that warrants much greater research, namely the public’s perceptions and likely acceptance of commercial drone deliveries. There is some good background literature used to define the issues but a key weakness is that the survey results are not set into context against any of the other public perception work that has been undertaken around the world. The major drone trials that are on-going (e.g. Wingcopter, Manna) have lots of anecdotal evidence being produced. The analysis is also quite basic with no statistical interpretation having been undertaken. This limits the value of the overall findings.

Specific comments relate to:

1)      ‘E-commerce’s has proved along the pandemic to adapt to customer-centric services and has led to increased profitability, customer bases, and added-value alternatives to order goods and packages’ …… English needs sorting here.

2)      ‘Added to this challenge, which in its main structure is strongly conducted by digitization [9], operators must keep a competitive edge in the sector through an increasing incorporation of emerging vehicle technologies and methods that cope with the European Commission’s environmental targets’. ….. methods that cope with? I think you mean new technologies which can help logistics providers meet strict EU environmental targets whilst meeting the bottom line.

3)      Line 33 …. Unmanned aerial systems should be changed to ‘uncrewed aerial systems’

4)      Line 37 …. ‘Cargo drones can carry small-size and lightweight packages to respond to the smaller, fragmented, and frequent deliveries sourced by e-commerce [7,13]’. This statement needs more evidence. What is ‘small size’ and ‘light weight’? You could discuss Zipline, Manna, Skyports, Windracers, Modini etc.

5)      Line 42 …. Why are vans ‘poorly consolidated’? what is meant by this statement? It would be very hard to find any other mode as efficient as a current B2C van-based parcel delivery round where 200-300 parcels are being delivered by one driver in a day. Small drones just could not compete with that for next day delivery at scale.

6)      Line 148 …. How was the survey administered? Who was the target audience? What were the core subject areas being asked? Did it have full ethics approval? More details needed here with regard to the background of the survey

7)      So how do the base results from the survey compare to general retail behaviour surveys? There should be some reference material used here for comparison

8)      Line 202 …. So the proportion in favour of drone delivery reduces from 71% to 45% if there is an increase in cost ….. what was this cost increase over the business-as-usual logistics fee and was this for standard next-day delivery? And were the results significant? Were any significance tests done as part of this research?

9)      Line 212 …. ‘Regarding the potential for public acceptance in cities, 76% consider that drones for city logistics purposes can bring positive impacts for cities and citizens and 62% would accept the area of residence to have drones flying over their homes’. How were these questions framed? Would 62% of citizens really accept drones flying over their homes at 200ft with a headway of 8 minutes? These findings have to be set into the contact of other literature and surveys that have been undertaken on the subject. Noise is a very significant issue.

10)    Line 251 …. ‘In spite recognizing the value for cities, respondents do not fully support public investment for building the required infrastructure for drones’. So did respondents have any idea what type of infrastructure would be needed to use commercial drones in cities? Would services be largely cable delivery negating the need for landings at the consignee or would managed drone-ports be the way forward? What future picture was painted to the respondents? This would no doubt influence the way they responded. There are some interesting citizen perception pieces emerging from Wingcopters trials in Australia that should be reviewed.

11)    Generally the whole paper requires a thorough proof reading by a native English speaker.

Author Response

Authors adapted the content of the paper to reply to all requests. Changes can be found in the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The subject of the manuscript, as the authors wrote, addresses the following.

"Added to the technological and operational challenges, cargo drones must also deal with the crucial factor of social acceptability. Social acceptability relates to the public perception of the positive and negative impact of the solution in their lives."

"This paper approaches the public’s receptiveness to the use cargo drones to back the move to low-carbon logistics. The work is supported by a survey that explores the perspective of non-experts about the future integration of drones into transport systems."

"This paper tries to contribute for a better understanding of the interaction between public knowledge, awareness and engagement with drones and the concerns and support for its use on city logistics."

- despite the above statements, the authors did not provide a clearly defined purpose and scope of the research, because the statement "... social acceptability towards the use of drones for city logistics purposes ..." is very imprecise. There is a lack of scientifically specific theses and the purpose of the study;

- the Methodology section is missing, in which the assumptions concerning the research should be presented, including the method of selecting the research sample, the technique of conducting the research, estimating the statistical error, assessing the statistical reliability of the sample, etc .;

- the questionnaire questions are not presented, which makes it impossible to assess the correctness of the statistical inference in order to confirm or refute the thesis;

- there is no justification for the sample size n = 300 in relation to the population size of N = 5,200,000; are the results obtained from such a small sample of 0.006% (!) statistically reliable?

- the presentation of the obtained results is purely descriptive, which makes their analysis very difficult; in this case, graphs with a synthetic commentary are much better.

Author Response

Authors clarified the content of the paper to reply to this comment and also inserted specific content to reply to reviewer’ suggestions. Changes can be found in attach.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

First of all, I appreciate the opportunity to review the paper Public acceptance towards the use of drones in city logistics: a citizen’s centric perspective.   The topic is actual and important. However, this is not a scientific paper.

·        *The paper is not aligned with the aim and scope of Sustainability.

·        *The paper is very trivial.

·       * Literature review, linking with previous research, and gap analysis are modest and not appropriate.

·        *Research questions are missing.

·        *The survey is very modest and poorly described.

·        *Strong methodology is missing.

·        *Critical scientific approach is missing.

·        *The analysis of the results is not even at the level of the newspaper article.

·        *The paper doesn’t have a structure of a scientific paper.

·        *The practical and theoretical implications are missing.

·        *In a qualitative and quantitative sense, this is not a scientific paper.

·        *The paper is absolutely without scientific contribution.

Author Response

Authors ackwnowledge the effort the reviewer spent on making the review. However, the reviewer does not provide any specific evaluation comment, but rather chooses to write biased evaluations and comments made in an unusual destructive tone to authors, that should not be aligned with the aim and scope of Sustainability. 

•       *The paper is not aligned with the aim and scope of Sustainability. 
•       *The paper is very trivial. 
•      *Literature review, linking with previous research, and gap analysis are modest and not appropriate.
•       *Research questions are missing.
•       *The survey is very modest and poorly described.
•       *Strong methodology is missing.
•       *Critical scientific approach is missing.
•       *The analysis of the results is not even at the level of the newspaper article. 
•       *The paper doesn’t have a structure of a scientific paper.
•       *The practical and theoretical implications are missing.
•       *In a qualitative and quantitative sense, this is not a scientific paper.
•       *The paper is absolutely without scientific contribution.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I can see that the authors have made an attempt to address the queries raised but there is still limited statistical interpretation.

I am happy for it to go forward for production BUT there is still some English editing that needs doing in places

Author Response

1. I can see that the authors have made an attempt to address the queries raised but there is still limited statistical interpretation. > regarding this specific point, authors are not able to explore the data further than what has been explored. Authors are aware that the way the questions were performed, mostly without using a Likert scale for instance, limit the interpretation of the survey results, but at this point in time, we cannot explore into more detail than the one that was performed due to the way the survey was conducted.
2. I am happy for it to go forward for production BUT there is still some English editing that needs doing in places > Authors requested a Professional English revision and the current version results from that input

Reviewer 3 Report

The explanations and the extension of the text by the authors are satisfactory.

Author Response

"The explanations and the extension of the text by the authors are satisfactory."

Authors are thankful for reviewer 3 to recognize our effort to reply to all questions.