Air Taxis vs. Taxicabs: A Simulation Study on the Efficiency of UAM

Abstract

Growing urbanization increasingly leads to negative effects on the overall transportation and personal transport traffic. In particular, traffic congestions with huge delays, especially during rush hours are causing problems. Urban Air Mobility (UAM) solutions aim at utilizing the airspace above the city for personal transport by introducing potentially autonomous, small vertical take-off and landing vehicles to tackle this development. This paper explores the advantages of UAM, or air taxis, compared to ground-based taxicabs in terms of route lengths and travel time. For this, a simulation study was carried out for a European metropolitan area, namely the downtown of Hamburg, Germany. A number of places was identified within the area that would be suitable for carrying UAM hubs, so called vertidromes. The study was realized using DLR’s drone traffic scenario generator, including technology developed for the in-house 4D trajectory planning and deconfliction solution. Scenarios were based on publicly available map data from OpenStreetMap. The scenarios assume that a direct connection between two hubs is demanded in a regular, short interval of time. Both a UAM connection and a ground transport are then scheduled simultaneously, allowing a direct comparison of travel time and distance. Conflict-free routing is considered for the UAM system. A time saving of 50% for the pure travel time as well as a route length saving of up to 16% for the air taxi vs. taxicab connections could be deduced from the simulation.