Urban Air Mobility (UAM): Airport shuttles or city-taxis?

In the last years, Urban Air Mobility (UAM) has been receiving increasing attention and even if the first services are expected to be launched shortly, there is still uncertainty about which type of commercial services (e.g., airport shuttles or city-taxis) will be implemented at an early stage, as well as which price point will be perceived as affordable by travelers. Based on data collected through a large-scale survey campaign in the Milan metropolitan area (Italy), in this paper passengers' value of travel time savings for different UAM services are estimated using advanced discrete choice modeling. Estimated mixed logit models allowed to comparatively analyze the differences between the two potential use cases, i.e., airport shuttle and city-taxi services. Results show a willingness to pay for UAM services from/to airports that is greater (in a range of 44%–57%) than for travelling within the metropolitan area, and greater (in a range of 31%–44%) for business travels than for other purposes, indicating that the most financially sustainable UAM services will potentially be available for airport-shuttle connections from/to central business districts.