Flying Taxis: They May Be More Than Just Pie in the Sky
Ten years from now, we could be zipping through town by air like the Jetsons. But there are many complications to be worked out first.
Scott Beyer, Urban Issues Columnist
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April 15, 2021
| Opinion
Throughout the last decade, cities gained a plethora of new mobility options — Uber and Lyft, e-scooters, dockless bikes — and scrambled to set rules for them. But the latest transport innovation — flying taxis — promises to be even more disruptive, and represents a whole new planning decision ballgame.
This technology — known as vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) — seems to be arriving quickly, with a flood of investor capital being dumped into hundreds of companies. This winter, for example, United Airlines announced a $1 billion order from Silicon Valley-based Archer Aviation, which hopes to launch flights by 2024. Uber sold its air taxi wing to a firm called Joby, which predicts service rollout by 2023. In France, Ascendance Flight Technologies expects soon-to-deploy flights on trips under 250 miles. Other examples abound worldwide. In many of these cases, VTOL is presented as a ride-hailing service that will provide mid-to-long-distance intra-urban trips — hence the moniker “flying taxi.”