Assessing the Value of Urban Air Mobility through Metropolitan-Scale Microsimulation: A Case Study of the San Francisco Bay Area

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) has garnered billions of dollars in investment with early proofs-of-concept and deployments across the world. However, its viability as a transport mode will be strongly determined by benefits in travel time. Hence, before optimizing the planning and infrastructure provision for UAM’s deployment, the dynamics of UAM trips must first be simulated and understood in order to determine the total addressable market. This work contributes to the existing scholarship in several ways. First, we use an ultra-fast parallelized, GPU-based microsimulator, MANTA, to study the regional characteristics of UAM trips compared to driving trips, simulating millions of morning trips in the San Francisco Bay Area. Second, we provide a novel, data-driven approach to determine the demand of multi-modal UAM in different network designs, leveraging the speed of MANTA for iterative convergence. Third, we provide a granular yet regional-scale analysis of trips, showing congestion's sensitivity to the number of vertiports as well as transfer times. The number of benefited trips from UAM increases most significantly when the vertiport network expands from 10 to 30 vertiports, with lesser but steady growth beyond 30 vertiports. Assuming a transfer time of 2 minutes at each of the origin and destination vertiports, results indicate that the average distance of trips that benefit from multi-modal UAM decreases, ranging from approximately 54 km to 30 km, as the number of vertiports increases incrementally from 10 to 100. Travel times on the ground improve at all network designs, but the extent of benefit increases as the number of vertiports increases. Finally, we note that there is an equity component to UAM, in which travelers who do not opt to take UAM at all still benefit from the efficiency increases in the transportation network. This suggests that at particular network designs and deployments, UAM can be valuable to an entire metropolitan area.