The Potential of Low-Altitude Airspace: The Future of Urban Air Transportation

Many megacities, such as London, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Beijing, and Shanghai, have been born due to urban- ization. While citizens enjoy the convenience of city life, such cities suffer from drawbacks of transportation: the average commute time has been increasing over the past years. With the maturity of electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft technology, decision-makers have started to look upward to the low-altitude airspace. This blue space has the potential to reshape the transportation system and shorten the average travel time in daily life. To explore this emerging area, we held a Distributed/Decentralized Hybrid Workshop on Sustain- ability for Transportation and Logistics (DHW-STL), and this letter summarizes the outcomes of our discussion. Here, we first pinpoint the pain issues of conventional transportation. Then, we present the emerging low-altitude airspace transportation option, followed by a discussion on how such a new transportation option can integrate with the conventional ground-based transportation system. Some thoughts about the pathway to further development of the integrated transportation system are shared finally.