Reinventing Mobility Paradigms: Flying Car Scenarios and Challenges for Urban Mobility

Flying vehicles are receiving more and more attention and are becoming an opportunity to start a new urban mobility paradigm. The most interesting feature of flying cars is the expected opportunity they could offer to reduce congestion, traffic jams and the loss of time to move between origin/destination pairs in urban contexts. In this perspective, urban air mobility might meet the concept of “sustainable mobility”, intended as the ideal model of a transport system that minimizes the environmental impacts by maximizing efficiency and travel speed. For transport engineering planning issues, further knowledge is required in this field to understand the effects that a possible urban air mobility system, including the ground traffic component, could have in terms of sustainable mobility in the above meaning. This paper contributes to this topic by providing an analysis of different urban flying car scenarios by using an agent-based approach with different traffic conditions. The preliminary results obtained on some test networks and focusing on travel cost effects suggest that the expected advantages the flying car will depend on trip origin/destination points, average distances travelled in the urban contexts and the location of transition nodes, which are introduced as interchange nodes between aerial and ground mode.