A Traffic Demand Analysis Method for Urban Air Mobility

This paper explores the addressable market for Urban Air Mobility (UAM) as a multi-modal alternative in a community. To justify public investment, UAM must serve urban mobility by carrying a significant portion of urban traffic. We develop a traffic demand analysis method to estimate the maximum number of people that can benefit from UAM, for a given use case, in a metropolitan region. We apply our method to about three hundred thousand cross-bay commute trips in the San Francisco Bay Area. We estimate the commuter demand shift to UAM under two criteria of flexibility to travel time savings and three criteria of vertiport transfer times. Our results indicate that even for commuters with high value of time, and long transfer times at vertiports, almost forty-five percent of demand would benefit from UAM when the roads are highly congested. Even when the roads are mostly free, about three percent of the demand can benefit from UAM with the right combination of commuter flexibility and transfer times. Finally, our method also produces the number, location and distribution of demand over vertiports that can support value proposition, policy-making and technology research for UAM.