Uber’s Elevate program – which aims to create ‘urban aerial ridesharing’ – is seeking to partner with an ‘international city’ for a ‘flight on-demand’ service that it plans to start in 2023.
Uber says that customers will be able to push a button and get a flight on-demand. To enable this, it says it has assembled a network of partners that ‘include vehicle manufacturers, real estate developers, technology developers and more’.
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As part of the strategy to bring ‘uberAIR’ to market, Uber also plans to partner with three ‘launch cities’. This, it says, will allow for a balance between focus and city diversity that will set the service up for long-term success.
Dallas and Los Angeles have previously been announced as the first two launch cities and Uber is now ‘seeking an international city as the third partner’. These three cities, it says, will be the first to offer uberAIR flights, with the goals of operating demonstrator flights starting in 2020 and beginning commercial operations in 2023.
The third launch city opportunity is ‘open to any city outside the US where there is a desire for a dramatic improvement in transportation and conditions are conducive to urban air mobility’.
It says that cities with a greater metropolitan area population in excess of 2 million people and a density of over 2,000 people per square mile ‘would be able to support pooled ridesharing services and thus benefit the most from an uberAIR network’.
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By GlobalDataUber also says ideal cities are ‘polycentric, with multiple dense nodes of development in an urban area, and face significant traffic congestion. A large and dispersed city layout means that uberAIR will be able to offer significant time saving benefits at speeds of 150-200 miles per hour’.
The presence of a nearby large airport where travel may often take more than one hour to or from the city centre—due to distance, demand, or bottlenecks (e.g., bridges, tunnels)—will make for a compelling use case, Uber maintains.
Because uberAIR will be providing transportation from node-to-node rather than point to point, it says it is ‘critical that it can be integrated into a multi-modal solution that includes other options such as public transit, ridesharing, bikeshare and walking in a dense residential area’.
Cities should have stable and conducive environmental conditions that are well suited for aviation operations including a lack of extreme weather, temperature, and elevation.
To facilitate the building of ‘Skyports’, Uber notes that it will be important to have the involvement of at least one large local real estate partner. It will also be valuable to have a streamlined building permitting, as well as zoning processes that enable mixed-use transit-oriented development and reduced parking requirements.
Uber also says that delivering on the goal of operating ‘100% electric VTOL aircraft will ultimately require a robust electrical grid supplied by low carbon intensity energy. A city’s commitment to reduce its carbon footprint and invest in grid modernising technology is critical’.
Unlocking the potential of the sky will ‘require modernising policies and regulations’, Uber says.
Uber is looking for expressions of interest from prospective cities by July 1st, 2018. Following that date, the Elevate team plans to start conversations ‘in earnest with cities who have submitted an Expression of Interest where an uberAIR network would be a good fit’.
