In the future, more people will commute by air
This post is about short-distance commutes, such as within a city. Or to commuter towns, which are towns from people commute daily to a nearby city for work, like Tumkur to Bangalore:
The Japanese commute as much as a 200 km a day by bullet train:
In the future, more of the 200 km or shorter commutes that currently happen on the surface, such as by road or train1, will instead happen using eVTOLs. These will be electric, and take off and land vertically.
I’m not saying that nobody will travel on the surface; just that more journeys will be by air than today.
Why?
First, when you travel by air, it’s point to point, taking 10 km:
Instead of 15:
This is not even counting congestion — even if there are no other vehicles on the road, and all the roads are reserved exclusively for you, it will still take 15 km instead of 10 km. If both a car and a eVTOL travel at 60 km/hour, it will take the eVTOL 10 minutes, as compared to 15 minutes for the car. This is 50% slower. An hour-long trip would extend by half an hour. In addition to taking longer to reach your destination, the longer you’re on the road, the longer you’re causing congestion for others, slowing them down, and causing further congestion for others. This is a cascading effect.
Second, when you travel by road, only some part of the land is available for roads. In the US, that’s only 18%. Obviously — we need buildings, parks, lakes, etc. When you travel by air, 100% of the space is available. This is a 6x increase in the available area for travel. This results in far less congestion for the same number of trips. This is not even mentioning that in the air, vehicles can travel above or below each other, resulting in infinite capacity.
Third, technology is easing some of the constraints for air travel. Electric craft do away with pollution. Clean energy in all its forms — solar, wind and offshore wind — is becoming cheaper:
Solar fell by 82%, wind by 38%, and offshore wind by 29%. As we enter a period of energy surplus, the high energy use of air travel will be less of a constraint.
This is similar to how when I was a kid in the 80s, air-conditioning at home was rare. If someone had it, the rest of us would ooh and aah about it. We’d note with surprise and alarm how much they’re paying just for electricity. AC owners were considered well to do. Now, of course, ACs are common and boring. The same thing will happen to air travel.
Autonomous flying will also eliminate the high cost of a pilot. And an automated air traffic control will eliminate the cost of manual air traffic control, which can’t scale to tens of thousands of vehicles concurrently flying over each metro.
Fourth, as land prices rise, it will be more and more costly to allocate land space to roads and rail lines.
Fifth, surface transport like road or rail costs proportional to the distance traveled. Building a 100 km road costs 10 times as much as building a 10 km road. On the other hand, eVTOLs require only landing pads equipped with chargers at either end2, not throughout the path. This makes them cheaper, and since economics drives everything, it will result in update of eVTOLs.
It’s not just cost: road and rail infrastructure like the Bangalore Metro has been delayed for decades. I remember seeing a hoarding for it 20 years ago, and even now, you can’t travel anywhere in the city by metro as you can with the London underground. By contrast, eVTOLs just require a landing pad at either end and can be built in months rather than decades. Once two pads are built, people can travel between them immediately. By contrast, if only two ends of a road are built, nobody can travel on the road.
Sixth, eVTOLs could come in different sizes from a one-seater, which is the equivalent of a motorcycle, to one with capacity comparable to a bus. High-capacity routes like an airport in a metropolis like Bangalore will use bigger ones. Vehicles will be shared, so that all seats are filled, to reduce cost3. They'll be point to point, to save journey time4. Unless the trip exceeds the capacity of the eVTOL, in which case a person could transfer to another vehicle to complete the trip.
Seventh, metro stations, bus terminals, airports, motorway ramps and exits, ferry terminals and seaports will all have a landing pad. That way, you can quickly connect from an eVTOL to another mode of transportation.
Eighth, office parks, malls and other high-traffic places5 will have a landing pad.
In summary, today air travel is for long distances, like hundreds or thousands of kilometers. Short trips of < 200 km happen on the surface. In the future, this mix will change. Some proportion of short trips will happen by air.
Whether metro, light rail, monorail or commuter rail.
In fact, an eVTOL can also travel between a landing pad equipped with a charger and a place with no infrastructure, like an open field or the terrace of a building with enough clearance. This will halve the range of the vehicle, since it now has to have enough battery power for the return journey, too, but there will still be enough sites that meet this requirement and have enough demand.
Though someone could pay more for a dedicated vehicle.
A commuter who’s price-sensitive may be given an option to wait for another vehicle traveling to the same destination with an empty seat, in exchange for a discount. Or to get off close to the desired destination, rather than exactly there, and then walk or ride a bicycle for a kilometer or two. Some people prioritise time, and others cost. Design the system for the former, and then accommodate the later via discounts.
Not stadiums, since they’re empty most of the time.