Urban Air Mobility Is Here. Here’s How Cities Can Adapt.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in April 2024. It has been updated to reflect current trends and conditions.

Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing vehicles, known as eVTOLs, are coming into commercial and public use in the not-too-distant future. Behind the scenes, significant amounts of investment are fueling dozens of start-up manufacturers, the FAA and eVTOL companies are advancing flight testing, and the executive branch is pushing to accelerate adoption.

Air-traffic control systems and FAA regulations are close to aligning in support of this innovative mobility opportunity. At the same time, cities are beginning to plan and build the necessary infrastructure to support this sustainable solution. Here’s how cities can adapt and thrive by embracing this new form of transit technology.

Helipads: eVTOLs’ Natural Take-Off

The immediate use case for eVTOLs is to coexist with existing helicopter traffic, using current helipad infrastructure but removing the dependence on fossil fuels by incorporating electric equipment to recharge between flights. In addition, fitting out off-site locations such as unused parking lots or garage decks for recharging would help provide for overnight storage and electricity at much lower rates.

Residents in dense urban areas, such as New York City, where helicopter flights are in high use will see immediate benefits with the evolution and integration of eVTOLs. With air traffic up and down the Hudson River and across the dense populations of Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island, some residents experience a helicopter overhead every three to five minutes during busy periods. This amount of traffic barely offers a moment of quiet on the streets, parks, and homes below, necessitating a public effort to reduce the noise pollution of helicopters.

Using electricity as fuel, eVTOLs can offer immediate relief from public noise pollution with impressively quiet outputs. One eVTOL company advertises sound emission at 55dB, 1,000 times quieter than the average helicopter. At 55dB, the sound of a flight above is the equivalent of a residential street, or a normal conversation between two people — that’s quite remarkable for a craft that can travel 200 mph.

eVTOL and Airport Adaptations

An early-use case is likely to be the adaptation of general aviation airport terminals, known as fixed base operators. The next scale of implementation will see an expansion of availability for larger urban and regional use.

The key technological advancement in eVTOLs versus a helicopter or a small prop aircraft is the adjustable propellers that allow vertical takeoff. The craft’s ability to depart vertically, straight up into the air enables huge possibilities for urban use that were never possible with the flight paths and clearances required for safe use of helicopters and other aircraft.

With its vertical takeoff capabilities, eVTOL infrastructure, known as a vertiport, can be located much closer to a passenger’s departure location or destination than a helipad, saving valuable time compared to a trip to the airport and significantly increasing the value proposition of air travel.

For example, a typical trip from most locations in Manhattan to JFK International Airport can take at least 90 minutes on roads or public transit. Alternatively, heading from Midtown Manhattan to an eVTOL vertiport and flying to JFK could see a “door-to-door” travel time of 20 minutes, most of it spent on boarding and disembarking, while the actual flight itself, at a speed of 140 mph, would be a mere seven minutes.

At a higher rate of use, eVTOLs could reduce loads on the often maxed-out curbside drop-off and pickup areas. At a busy hub airport like Atlanta or LAX, the time from the airport entrance to the curbside for drop off can be the longest part of your trip to the airport.

An Urban Network of Vertiports

With expanded use, vertiports could be integrated in numerous locations - atop parking decks in downtown locations, hospitals, office skyscrapers, or even hotels — offering direct shuttle services for customers or clients

In a city like L.A., with highly congested traffic and generally low-lying structures, a network of eVTOL vertiports would significantly cut down on cross-town travel time and potentially reduce loads on existing transit infrastructure.

High Congestion eVTOL Relief

eVTOL use could assist in traffic relief in other special cases. For example, New York City experiences heavy congestion when the United Nations General Assembly is in session every September. The eVTOL transport of high-security individuals would relieve stress on all the other mobility systems in the city. A similar scenario is planned to transport athletes for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

Another special case would be the transportation of patients in emergency situations. An eVTOL ambulance could take off from the roof of a hospital, land on a neighborhood street or parking lot with adequate space, and rush a patient needing urgent emergency care back to the hospital, saving critical time that otherwise would be spent in an ambulance battling traffic in high-density areas.

A Key Ingredient for Multimodal Mobility

New eVTOL technology offers denizens of cities and urban centers a more pleasant, sustainable, and efficient form of mobility. Medium-scale eVTOL implementation would provide significant improvements from the disruptive sound of helicopters traversing the urban skies, while opening new possibilities for faster transit.

The anticipated swift integration of eVTOL travel, given the developments in the commercial and regulatory spheres, will provide this sector of air travel an exponential boost while contributing to a mobility system more aligned with broad sustainability agendas.

As Gensler Global co-Chair Andy Cohen noted, the backbone of cities will remain large-scale public transportation, but the eVTOL has the potential to serve a useful scale, providing quieter skies, reduced emissions, relief on existing infrastructure, and expanded accessibility, offering compelling opportunities for addressing the challenges in the next generation of urbanization.