Corporate Car Parking Spaces

Pass an amendment to existing legislation to mandate California employers also install a “Vertiport”, when mandated automobile parking spaces are over an appropriate threshold # of parking spaces.

Introduction

A Vertiport is a location not dissimilar to an existing Helicopter pad. A Vertiport optimized for Urban Air Mobility should be able to handle 100 flights per hour, so accommodate 400 in-bound commuters per hour .

A “Mega-Vertiport” can be vertically stacked on as little as 2 acres could handle as many as 1,000 landings per hour and 1,000 landings could deliver as many as 4,000 passengers per hour.

To give some context, a Mega-Vertiport built in Facebook’s car park could potentially handle 4,000 commuters per hour which is equivalent of 1/3rd of Facebook’s Menlo Park staff total of 12,000.

A Mega-Vertiport built in each of the large Bay Area’s existing employer’s car parks would only displace parking for approximately 300 cars, yet could enable at least 1/3rd of its work force to commute car free every day. 1,000 Vertiports installed all over the Bay Area could move 1.5 million commuters per hour which would enable ¼ of the 4 million Bay Area workers to fly to work everyday.

A fleet of 40,000 eVTOL’s could move 1.5 million people to work everyday in the San Francisco, Bay Area. This means that a Silicon Valley “Air Metro” system would require less than 1/3rd of the cars manufactured in the world each and every day.

Zoning Mandates

Statewide mandated changes to zoning laws are always difficult. However, we need to recognize that income inequality and the housing crisis that is contributing towards the the flight of our citizens as well as their employers to lower cost locations, is an existential threat to California’s economic well being.

An air metro could be part of the solution, but the establishment of a transit system in the sky requires Vertiports to be built and a large number of them would need to be located in employer’s existing car parks. Going through a separate planning application, for every city and employer in northern California, will ensure that a Vertiport in every Bay Area city and large employer campus will take more than our life-time’s to become a reality.

One way to accelerate the adoption of an “Air Metro” that could move 1.5 million workers per day, would be to mandate that all employers with car parks over a certain size be mandated to allocate some of that automobile parking towards the location of a Vertiport.

Incentives

To make the mandates more attractive and ensure the Vertiports are actually built, incentives will need to be offered.

These incentives may take the form of zoning law changes that allow for an equal percent of the land allocated to a Vertiport also be allocated towards new buildings. A further inducement to get commuters out of cars, might be an additional incentive of extra land can be converted to buildings if a threshold of employees commute on a regular basis via the “Air Metro”.

For example, if a land owner is mandated to allocate 2 acres of their existing car park towards the space of a Vertiport, then that land owner may also take an additional 2 acres and use that space for additional buildings. The land owner is incentivized to install a Vertiport as the reward is that those additional 2 acres can now be built upon, essentially turning low value land into land than at current San Francisco prices, could be worth up to $10 million per acre.