Decoding the Vertiport: Planning for Urban Air Mobility

The potential of advanced air mobility (AAM) has recently been receiving a tremendous amount of attention in both the media and within the research literature. In particular, service in urban environments, referred to as urban air mobility (UAM), has received the overwhelming majority of focus. This nascent field, centered around electric vertical takeoff and landing flying vehicles (eVTOLs), is capturing imaginations and investments at an impressive pace. Yet, guidance on the siting and development of vertiports, the interface between ground transit and UAM, is trailing the pace of the forthcoming service. Vertiports are expected to operate like bus stops, transit stations, helipads, and airports. Still, this new public transportation infrastructure has the potential to dramatically alter the urban landscape due to their space requirements, safety requirements, and pace of low-altitude flight operations. Therefore, current and long-range plans must acknowledge this potential, and planning stakeholders must utilize participatory geographic information systems (GIS) to select safe, efficient, and accessible locations for vertiports to ensure future capital investment. Because of its unique attributes and requirements, the site selection process for UAM infrastructure demands a unique perspective that varies from the planning criteria for traditional transit hubs. This article summarizes the current UAM literature and offers stakeholders an informed yet simple workflow process for urban, suburban, and exurban site suitability selection that can be implemented during preliminary community engagement and early master planning processes. An example case in which this workflow was applied is provided using the San Francisco Bay Area as recent literature has shown this area to be a prime candidate for a UAM transportation network of vertiport locations being integrated into a regional multi-modal transit system.