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Comment by icyfox | Hacker News Reader

As much as I want to live in a world with the Jetsons, what's the business case here? Presumably it's going to have to launch vertically from the top of buildings, which means that you can go from skyscraper landing pad to skyscraper landing pad. How many taxi users are trying to travel within a financial district? I imagine much more commonly they're trying to go from high-density to low-density (like FiDi to West Village) which this operating model could only support if you build a serious amount of elevated architecture.

Not to mention having to pay for insurance premiums of a miniaturized airplane that is zipping around a heavily inhabited urban area.

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There are probably enough people of financial means who are willing to pay for expensive and much faster taxi service, especially if they can go to the roof of the building they're currently in to depart.

There are lots of reasons why this won't work, but it could work... and it could be quite useful in the right scenario.

Lots of useful long distance flights leave early in the morning, meaning to get to the airport for those flights you have to leave VERY early. But with an air taxi like this, it might allow you to save a couple of hours and a lot of headache.

It's not really mass-marketable though, and I doubt we could expect to see a constant stream of little air taxis buzzing around.

Chances are the roof of the building they're currently in will never have a heliport. Most buildings weren't designed to support the extra weight of a helipad (including equipment) plus aircraft, and the roofs are already covered with antennas and HVAC equipment.

In the foreseeable future there will only be a handful of heliports per city center. Most passengers will have to take ground transport to reach one.

True most buildings aren't designed for it, and they are already covered with antennas and AC units and such.

But weight is not an issue for light aircraft. For example, the Robinson R44 (4 place heli) is only 660kg empty. The Airbus taxi will be made as light as possible, so I wouldn't expect it to be much heavier.

As long as the supports for the landing pad are placed appropriately with the building structure, it shouldn't be any problem. More likely there would be the concern of accidents and the significant collateral damage they could cause.

There was a regular helicopter service on top of skyscrapers, like a bus. There isn't anymore, because things that go up, must come down.

"Urban" and "flying" will never happen.

I'm regularly astonished that we trust people with shopping carts, given how well they use them. Nobody is going to trust any density flying over our heads. Not even with auto pilot. Sorry Fifth Element fans.

The best case I've heard is helping to reduce traffic to places that expect a large influx of folks at the same time.

Concerts, for example - if you have a lot of these flying taxis, you can have people park in auxiliary lots that are 20 minutes away by car, then get shuttled over via air taxi. Depending on how many taxis and how fast the turnaround is, you could eliminate a non-negligible amount of traffic into/out of parking lots. Same with sporting events, etc.

And then on a similar note, airports - I believe something like this was proposed for LAX. In the same way that people park at off-site parking lots and take shuttle buses, they could park off-site and take air taxis.

These scenarios work relatively well because they put the air taxis in nonstop use for some period of time, and they have the space/infrastructure to set up spaces for them to land and load/unload folks.

At four people per vehicle, I doubt that you could achieve anything like a satisfactory throughput in this scenario, given reasonable traffic separation. Unloading will be one bottleneck, as each vehicle will need as much space as several buses, when you take into account sufficient separation to avoid unsafe aerodynamic interaction.

Or - and hear me out here - the US could invest in their public transportation infrastructure. But sure, let's do flying taxis.

Flying taxis is public transportation

Charging $3 for bus riders is controversial within the public transportation sphere, nevermind the $20 a car taxi can cost. Unless there's something about flying taxis that would make them price competitive with a $3 bus trip, it's hardly public transportation.

If there were automated and electricity was cheap its easy to imagine them being cost competitive vs a bus trip of the same distance just because they're so much faster. Making them price competitive is just a matter of how much the state is willing to subsidise them.

They are only faster because we refuse to build infrastructure for public transport. A Bus rapid transit system using one dedicated lane of traffic can move up to 30k per hour. Maybe we should use automation to build efficient public transit, instead of imagining hundreds of millions of private automated cars clogging the roads and robo taxis flying over those clogged roads. Build some light rail and buses with dedicated lanes, and use automated 4 passenger vehicles for “first mile, last mile”.

No they are not. Taxis aren't public transport either.

This CityAirbus takes what, 4-6 people seated? A bus easily takes 40+, a tram 60+ and a metro 250+* - and that's just seats, they all fit hundreds of people if you include standing passengers.

It would take ages and hundreds/thousands of flying taxis to clear a stadium, while it takes only tens of metro trains.

* Numbers taken from public transport options in my home town, will of course differ around the world

Taxis are not mass transit, but they are public transport per the definition.

Obviously this will not be comparable in capacity to a metro, but it can conceivably be comparable in capacity to bus lines which tend to operate at very low load factors in US cities, by virtue of being much faster to complete the same journey.

I'm not going to argue with you about the different definitions of public transportation, but for sure "taxi" isn't what comes to mind when someone mentions public transportation.

The point you're making is exactly the problem. The reason bus lines aren't used more is because they suck in a lot of cities. Improving the public transportation infrastucture (and no, not taxis), would solve this problem - as demonstrated in many European cities.

Here's a good video that compares the city planning of Houston to other cities, and explains why it sucks. It focuses more on cars vs. bikes, but the same basic point also applies to public transportation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54

You’ve hit the nail on the head. You need a big clearance for landing and take off, with dedicated space and easy ways for people to get to it. This is crazy expensive real estate, doesn’t scale usually beyond 1 target (unlike a parking structure), is scarce, and is ultimately the biggest constraint here that cannot be overcome by technology.

You can imagine them being used to get people from train stations or similar to tall buildings, I suppose.

Could make sense in some major cities in China, and maybe a handful of other places.

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