Nationwide Demand Modeling for an Urban Air Mobility Commuting Mission

In this paper, we present a comprehensive and reproducible urban air mobility (UAM) demand model centered around publicly available data and open source tools capable of demand estimation at the national level. A discrete mode-choice demand model is developed using longitudinal origin–destination employment statistics flow data, American community survey economic data, and the Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM) to identify the utility of a UAM commuter service relative to other modes of transportation. Using the implemented model, we identify New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles as cities with the highest potential commuter demand, and Seattle as the city most resilient to increases in delay time. A sensitivity study of demand is performed and shows that strong demand exists for short trips with low total delay times and for longer trips with a low ticket price per kilometer, with the former showing resilience to increases in operational costs and the latter showing resilience to increases in delays. The demand model is supported by a speed-flow model, which fuses highway performance monitoring system data with OpenStreetMap data to provide traffic-adjusted road segment speeds to OSRM. The speed-flow model has the capability of providing congestion data for road segments across the United States without the use of commercial data sets or routing services and is shown to improve routing duration accuracy in congested regions.