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Comment by erentz | Hacker News Reader

It would be cheaper (and far more effective) to just run a rail line to the exurbs in question. Why don't we do that first if connecting them is that valuable/important.

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Because fundamentally thats still less convenient for the customer. In a perfect world, you want to be picked up from your front door and dropped off at the front door of your destination. And if you can avoid highways and traffic, even better. This provides the infamous 'last mile' solution to transportation, instead of forcing everyone onto mainline routes and artery networks.

I don't see something like this scaling in the way that a rail network can. Shuttling a few people at a time won't be enough for morning/evening rush hour, you'd need loads of these to match the carrying capacity of a train, and then you've reinvented the problem of traffic (although presumably much less dense; e.g. I imagine you'd join a queue and have to wait until the airspace isn't congested before your journey is permitted).

That's also an optimistic outlook. One contributor to traffic is people using a whole car just for themselves; since we've not figured that out after several decades of having cars, I doubt making them fly will solve the problem.

I can imagine niches for this, and wish them luck, but I don't think it'll make a dent in mass commuter transport.

This doesn't even remotely provide a last mile solution because even if they get the aircraft working the landing pads will be more than a mile apart. Just because it's a VTOL aircraft didn't mean you can land it on a city street. A large, securely fenced area free of nearby obstacles will be needed. Where are you going to put those in a dense city? And don't try to tell me that they're going to land on building roofs; most roofs are unsuitable because they're too small or not flat or full of ventilation equipment and antennas.

Parking lots we don't need after autonomous cars.

And even the ones that are large, flat, and uncluttered won't take the weight of an aircraft.

There's a NASA study ("Concept of Operations", CONOPs) on VTOL taxis in Silicon Valley:

"Silicon Valley Early Adopter CONOPs and Market Study"

https://nari.arc.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/An...

Running a rail line point to point is cheap? More like impossible.

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