Challenge: The City of LA wants to get ahead of potential urban air mobility service providers by setting policy that increases access without increasing inequality.

Method: Stakeholder interviews, literature review, demographic and data analysis, scenario generation

Result: Future service scenarios, sound testing criteria and locations to determine community impacts and inform service planning, scenario selection and land use/permitting policy

Team: Peter Falt

Role: Research design, synthesis, testing criteria and design

Duration: 20 weeks

Possible futures service scenarios, and what they are like, can be represented in the amount of people moved, and the amount of activity created. What is it like? A freeway? a bus route? A shopping mall? A parking garage? All of these typologies have different levels of throughput. Stakeholder consultation revealed that the biggest constraint on air mobility traffic is the community impact that it creates, which 3-dimensional sound testing will illuminate.

The impacts on urban land use stem from activity created at take-off and landing sites, while permitting policy will define the throughput of travel corridors. Sound testing will define the envelope of perceptible airspace to an observer, and the resulting amount of traffic that is acceptable.