Designing and Simulating Urban Air Mobility Vertiport Networks under Land Use Constraints
Increased congestion and emissions due to a growing rate of urbanization has crippled mobility in metropolitan areas across the world, as seen in times both before the COVID-19 pandemic and as societies begin to live with COVID-19 as they return to normalcy. With distributed electric propulsion technology and battery energy densities improving, urban air mobility (UAM) has emerged as a potential alternative to the automobile for longer distance trips. However, the actual deployment of UAM remains uncertain. This paper provides increased clarity of practical UAM deployment by (1) developing a tool to design vertiport networks under specific land use constraints, and (2) exploring the travel time impacts of these networks using regional-scale traffic microsimulation. Using millions of trips in the San Francisco Bay Area as a case study, a k-medians clustering algorithm constrained to specific land use characteristics, including area of the parcel and zoning/building type, is developed. Further simulation and sensitivity analysis across these parameters reveal that as the number of vertiports increases, the average travel times of trips taken by UAM improve, but there is only benefit compared to driving above a certain number of vertiports. In addition, area constraints of the parcels deeply impact the travel times of UAM trips, suggesting that the research agenda must include efficient vertiport designs. By using real-world land use constraints, concrete UAM networks can be recommended to metropolitan planning organizations, local city officials, and regulatory bodies for future infrastructure provision, pushing UAM from pie-in-the-sky to boots-on-the-ground.
- Record URL:
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Supplemental Notes:
- This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AV095 Standing Committee on New Users of Shared Airspace.
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Corporate Authors:
Transportation Research Board
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Authors:
- Yedavalli, Pavan
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Conference:
- Transportation Research Board 100th Annual Meeting
- Location: Washington DC, United States
- Date: 2021-1-5 to 2021-1-29
- Date: 2021
Language
- English
Media Info
- Media Type: Web
- Features: Figures; References;
- Pagination: 7p
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Air transportation; Design; Land use; Mobility; Networks; Simulation; Travel time; Urban areas
- Geographic Terms: San Francisco Bay Area
- Subject Areas: Aviation; Design;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01763823
- Record Type: Publication
- Report/Paper Numbers: TRBAM-21-00693
- Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
- Created Date: Feb 4 2021 10:57AM