A new study “Who benefits from Urban Air Mobility? Spatial and income equity in multi-phased vertiport deployment” from the Technical University of Munich and Central South University, Changsha, China has concluded a 50% fare reduction intensifies income-based inequality for eVTOL services rather than mitigating it.
“This happens because fare reductions primarily increase trip frequency among upper-middle income households whose residential locations and commute profiles already align well with the cost and accessibility trade-off in siting, rather than expanding the beneficiary pool to underserved populations,” say researchers.
“Construction subsidies, by contrast, monotonically reduce income inequality. Subsidies make previously uneconomic locations viable, thereby pulling the concentration of benefits toward the middle of the income distribution. However, even full subsidization does not eliminate the pro-rich bias, and the bottom income quintile remains below proportionality across all regimes. Network scale sensitivity analysis revealed the 200-vertiport configuration approaches near income-neutrality, yet this requires nearly tripling infrastructure relative to the base case, with pronounced diminishing returns per additional vertiport.”
For more information
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667091726001214#d1e1468
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