UAM air taxis should operate like Uber, not buses, study finds

A research team from UC Berkeley (Cao, Srinivasan, Sengupta, Hansen) has released a paper on arXiv analyzing the economic feasibility of Urban Air Mobility (UAM) for airport access. The study tackles a central question: should UAM networks operate like scheduled transit (subways, buses) with fixed pricing, or like Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) such as Uber/Lyft with dynamic supply-demand matching? The authors propose a two-stage framework. First, a joint-supply-demand variable pricing problem uses a binary logit model to capture traveler trade-offs between travel time and fare. Second, an Electric Urban Air Mobility Vehicle Routing Problem with Non-linear Charging Time (eUAMVRP-NL) optimizes fleet scheduling and charging to derive revenue and cost estimates.

Applying this framework to Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) with an eight-vertiport network, the results clearly favor the TNC-like model. Variable pricing increases operating profits by over 100% compared to any fixed-pricing scheme. The study also finds economies of stage length—longer UAM flights are more profitable per mile. This suggests that early UAM deployments should focus on longer airport routes with dynamic pricing, rather than short, fixed-fare hops. The findings have direct implications for regulators and operators deciding on UAM business models and infrastructure investments.