Rebuttal of “Flying Cars Will Undermine Democracy and the Environment”
In a recent paper published by Kevin DeGood, the director of Infrastructure Policy at the Center for American Progress, Mr. DeGood argues that “Flying Cars Will Undermine Democracy and the Environment”. The paper lays out the case that flying cars will turbocharge sprawl and weaken the social cohesion that comes from shared experiences and geographic proximity that is essential to building consensus in a democracy.
This article is a rebuttal of Mr. DeGood’s thesis and lays out the case that emerging Urban Air Mobility (UAM) technology can in fact help improve the quality of our environment and strengthen our democracy.
The case for UAM technologies vs the automobile and densification
By: Peter Bell – UAMCAH.com
Mr. DeGood does not layout an alternative in his paper to the existing status quo of a commuter system predominantly based on the automobile, supplemented by a public transit system. The other part of the status quo that is represented by the conventional thinking that urban densification in partnership with an expansion of a terrestrial based transit system is the predominate solution to the housing affordability challenge, which along with income inequality is chafing at the core of our democracy.
This rebuttal makes the case that a UAM based “Transit System” or an ‘Air Metro” in the sky is better for the environment and our democracy than the existing the status quo that is represented by automobile and terrestrial transit commuting, in combination with the drive to skew public policy in favor of urban densification.
Electric powered UAM is better for the Environment
The WHO estimates that around 7 million people die every year from exposure to the fine particles present in polluted air, with roads being the 2nd biggest contributor to fine particle matter pollution (PM 2.5) pollution in the US. Electric cars are for sure a lot cleaner than fossil fuel powered cars, but even EV’s contribute to fine PM due to tire and brake dust. “Flying Cars” in contrast, only touch the ground on take-off or landing, and are electrically powered so would not contribute to air pollution.
Automobiles can be electrified to reduce the noise of the engine, but tire noise is not an easily solvable problem for the automobile. Traffic noise is a huge problem, especially for low income communities as noise contributes to heart disease and type 2 diabetes, so has dire effects on health. Urban Air Mobility technology is being designed to operate at or less than ambient noise levels. With UAM flights being conducted above 500 ft and at that altitude or greater, UAM vehicles will not be discernable above ambient noise. Transitioning away from predominantly automobile based commuting to UAM commuting can bring health benefits by reducing the noise levels polluting our lives and making us sick
Urban Air Mobility vehicles do not need a road like their wheel born brethren so there is no need to pave over 100’s of thousands of acres of land to build freeways or tear up communities to get right of way to lay rail track. Existing car parks can be converted to “Vertiports” and so enable a large volume of commuters to get to work everyday by utilizing a comparatively tiny amount of land that is already paved over for car parking.
In summary, transitioning our commuter system away from being predominantly automobile based to include a transit system based on UAM (Urban Air Mobility) technology would reduce the need to build roads, help clear the air of pollution, and begin to reduce the impact of road noise in our environment.
UAM can help strengthen our Democracy
One of the foundations of our democracy in America is that all of our people have access to equal opportunities. A huge number of people emigrated from Europe to the land of the free in a bid to escape the social “cast” system that locked out the majority of people from the upper reaches of society as they were not born into the right family. Socio-economic mobility, a hall mark of the “American Dream” and one of the pillars of our democracy, held out the ideal that anyone with the will, desire and ability to work hard could have a chance of making it in America.
This is less valid today and the parents you were born to, the college you attended and the zip code you live in has increasingly become increasingly determinant of your economic position in society rather than the amount of hard work you put in. Workers in the lower 50% percentile of our economy put an incredible effort into more than one job and yet see their quality of life evaporate due to housing costs.
On top of the burden of having to work at more than one job, low income workers are also having to endure ever increasingly long commutes to access their multiple jobs. This is creating an economic divide in our society that is increasingly determined by locational access to high paying employment opportunities rather than by ability or merit. Economic inequality, not geographic proximity, reduces the opportunity for the sharing of experiences that are essential to building consensus in a democracy.
In booming areas like the Silicon Valley with a median house price in San Mateo and San Francisco around $1.6 million dollars, it is no longer possible for even middle class workers like teachers, fire-fighters and police to live in the towns they work in. Some of the cops in San Mateo were sleeping in their cars rather than endure the horrendous commute into work every day. It got so bad that the city converted an old fire house barracks into sleeping accommodations for the commuting police officers so they could sleep in town overnight as described in the SF Chronicle story below:
Super Commuting
Super commuting has become a huge impediment to the quality of life in California as over 250,000 people spend over 90 minutes getting to work every day. A recent article by Lauren Hepler describes an example of this super commuting phenomena for Tesla workers:
“Silicon Valley's new extreme: The 2:30 a.m. tech bus from Salida”
It's 2:30 a.m. in the Central California farm town of Salida, and the only sound is the tech bus pulling into an unmarked lot surrounded by barbed wire. Men and women in work boots board in the moonlight. Next stop is 11 miles away in Manteca, and then it's another 55 miles to Fremont on the San Francisco Bay, where — an hour and a half hour later — the 4 a.m. shift at the Tesla factory starts.
"That just tells you the story of the Bay Area," said Russell Hancock, president and CEO of regional think tank Joint Venture Silicon Valley. "We're going to be in these farther-flung places, and that's our reality because we're not going to be able to create affordable housing."
Tech shuttle sprawl speaks to the unique pressures that the industry has put on the region. High tech salaries have driven up housing prices in Silicon Valley, San Francisco and the East Bay, forcing white- and blue-collar workers alike to move farther away from their jobs. The crisis is compounded by anti-development politics that make it hard to build new housing and patchwork public transit systems that make it difficult for commuters to get to work without driving. The mismatch between jobs and housing has become so extreme that Google and Facebook have proposed building thousands of apartments or condos on their own campuses.
https://www.protocol.com/silicon-valley-tech-shuttles
Reducing commute times down to less than 30 minutes will have a dramatic effect on family well-being as healthy, cohesive families are a vital pillar for a functioning democracy.
Poor air quality is bad for commuters as well as our environment
In study conducted 2018 indicated that air quality was low in commuting cars and poor in cabin air quality a significant threat to our health and well being.
Concentrations of traffic-related air pollutants are frequently higher within commuting vehicles than in ambient air. Pollutants found within vehicles may include those generated by tailpipe exhaust, brake wear, and road dust sources, as well as pollutants from in-cabin sources.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29298976/
And commuting via car in rush hour pollution may be more dangerous than you think according to a Duke University study:
In-car air study of commuting cars finds dangers to human health. The first in-car measurements of exposure to pollutants that cause oxidative stress during rush hour commutes has turned up potentially alarming results. The levels of some forms of harmful particulate matter inside car cabins was found to be twice as high as previously believed.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170721135331.htm
Reducing a commute time to 30 minutes by UAM in a non-plouting air vehicle will bring dramatic improvements to our physical health and reduce the burden on our health care system, as well as our surrounding environment.
Income inequality corrodes our democracy
The disparity between the haves and the have-nots goes all the way up and down the economic strata in our country, but income inequality is extreme in the Northern California region.
For example, an extremely low paid worker in Sutter county (about 80 miles away from San Francisco) will earn about $13,000 dollars per year. The same worker doing the same job, but doing that work in San Francisco county will make on average $32,000 per year. An income of $13,000 per year in Sutter county is not enough for a worker to gain access to housing in Sutter county nor is $32,000 per year sufficient an income to gain access to housing in San Francisco. A typical 2 bedroom one bath house in Yuba City in Sutter county will rent for $1,250 per month so is out of reach of a low income worker. That same worker can earn $32,000 per year in San Francisco county, but spending $1,250 per month on housing in San Francisco will only get access to a bunk bed in a shared room with non-family members.
UAM commuting would allow a low-income worker (who is a resident of Sutter county) to take a 30 minute, zero pollution, UAM flight to San Francisco and go to work at exactly the same job they were working at in Sutter county. The big difference is that this worker would be earning $32,000 per year (a 3x pay increase for the same work they did in Sutter county), so easily be able to afford the 2 bedroom, 1 bath home back in their home town of Yuba City that was previously un-affordable at $1,250/month. Subsidizing low income worker tickets on an “Air Transit” system so a ride only cost $1 per ticket would ensure Urban Air Mobility commuting is not just a thing for the elite worker.
For approximately $1 billion per year, an “Air Metro” could move 200,000 people per day from low cost housing areas to high income areas. Low-income workers could triple their incomes without doing a different job, but work the same job, just in a high-income area. A $1 billion subsidy price tag that would subsidize 200,000 low income workers commuting on an “Air Transit” system is similar to the $914 million the state of California spent from the Cap and Trade fund to subsidize approx. 4,000 “affordable” projects in 2019.
The bang for its’ buck the state of California can get from supporting Urban Air Mobility commuting for low income workers is dramatic. Opening access to the higher paying wage jobs that are available in dense urban areas like the Silicon Valley to all workers in Northern California so that they can enjoy a middle class lifestyle by living in the lower cost areas outside of the Silicon Valley. At the same time, UAM commuting can ensure that Silicon Valley industry can continue to grow and keep laying the golden eggs for the state that sees at least 1/3rd of California’s GDP being generated by the tech industry.
Another view
Another point of view might be skeptical of “Mass Transport” as this scenario implies a very high-scale and very mature UAM system capability. This point of view argues very credibly that this capacity UAM system is likely to be quite a way further in the future and that the required subsidies might end up being larger than anticipated. This viewpoint also suggests that the wage differential might erode if that many people were moving each day as a UAM system would reduce the price arbitrage between the locations.
This view is that AAM (Advanced Aerial Mobility) is more likely to move fewer people rather than thousands envisioned under the “Dollar Flight Club” scenario. A more limited AAM system would still be beneficial as it could move those fewer people so they can create more and better jobs in the Bay Area’s smaller surrounding cities. The economic opportunities opened up by entrepreneurs doing their next start-up in the Bay Area’s surrounding towns like Tracy, Stockton, Sacramento, Santa Rosa or Monterey would be equally compelling for the Greater Bay Area and the entire Northern California region as the scenario envisioned with a “Dollar Flight Club” on a Greater Bay Area Air Metro transit system.
Under this scenario, Advanced Aerial mobility could enable “remote entrepreneurs” to still remain connected to each other so that the exchange of ideas, as well as access to talent and capital can still occur. Distributing entrepreneurial activity around the Greater Bay Area could mean that more people would find compelling and lucrative and fulfilling career paths closer to where they lived. The end result would be that fewer people would have to endure 2 hour commutes in order to pursue their career potential in the concentrated Silicon Valley as these types of jobs would be available everywhere in the Greater Bay Area.
Creating economic engines in many city centers and not just having these engines concentrated in the San Francisco - San Jose corridor solves multiple problems simultaneously. Distributing the economic activity around the Greater Bay area increases the economic opportunities for more people to find high-quality jobs over a larger geographical area. At the same time, this distributed approach decreases the focused demand for housing in a single corridor and thus reduces the cost of housing, as well as the cost of schooling, services and all the other items that go into the overall cost of living.
AAM has the potential to reduce the total vehicle miles traveled by all citizens in the Greater Bay Area, with the concomitant environmental and health/wellness benefits derived from reducing commuting time. Aerial mobility can be the transportation medium that nudges us toward a more even distribution of economic opportunity and ultimately toward the poly-centric, megacity regions that are sustainable in the long-run.
A legacy transportation infrastructure that is path-based, with routes that were laid down 150 years ago to and from a single center node cannot easily get us through this transition. A nodal network, free of path infrastructure and inherently flexible to shifting movement demand like a transport system that is enabled by AAM technology, is what is needed to help us start the bridging process to a more equitable and sustainable economy.
Under a scenario of distributed economic activity connected by AAM, there is no need to move large numbers of people everyday as a tiny percentage of the number of people would be moving on the AAM system compared to the numbers projected in the “Dollar Flight Club” scenario. Even a more limited AAM system, when brought to life in combination with distributed economic activity could get us a long way toward reaping the same benefits that a mass transit system in the sky could bring to our environment and democracy.
The COVID 19 pandemic will likely accelerate the growth of the tech industry
The internet has penetrated approximately 15% of our lives on a worldwide basis with the US actually lower than the global average at an approximate 10% penetration rate.
The rise of the internet was causing service industries like physical retailing to face “Armageddon” like market declines before the COVID crisis, but who now face “Extinction” like market conditions during the worldwide COVID 19 lockdown. The pandemic lock-in is accelerating the rate of internet adoption into our daily lives as we all adapt to working from home and this accelerating move on-line sees an increasing proportion of economic activity being conducted on-line. This shift on-line will fuel the growth of the already massive tech industry in Silicon Valley and bodes well for the companies in the Valley eco-system where you could easily see growth of these companies that parallels the doubling or tripling of Internet commerce.
However, a huge threat to the continued growth of the Silicon Valley tech industry is the cost of real-estate and difficulty of traffic congestion. In 2019 there were 390,000 more jobs in the Silicon Valley than there were in the height of the Dot Com boom of the late 90’s. This increase in the number of people working in tech, along with the increase in the level of wealth generated by the tech industry saw the median house price increase from $600,000 in 2011 to $1.6 million in 2019. Just imagine what would happen to the price of real estate if the Silicon Valley tech industry doubled in size by the year 2030!
These market conditions have led to well-known entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook to espouse the view that Silicon Valley is no-longer the place to start up a venture. Facebook was originally based on the East Coast and the move to Silicon Valley helped propel the company into becoming the behemoth it is today. It is particularly telling that someone like Mark Zuckerberg would come to the conclusion that Silicon Valley is no longer the place to start or grow a company.
UAM can take the cap off Silicon Valley growth
Urban Air Mobility has the ability to take off the cap on Silicon Valley’s growth potential that the price of peninsular real estate is starting to exert on the Valley’s tech eco-system. If ¼ of the 4.5 million Silicon Valley workers as well as the 400,000 new workers that will be needed to fuel a doubling of the size of the Silicon Valley tech industry all could be located in the “Greater Bay Area”. A “Greater Bay Area Air Transit System” would allow tech workers to live anywhere in an 85 mile radius of Silicon Valley and still be at the company’s physical location in under 30 minutes when on-site work is required.
By taking the cap off growth that is imposed by exorbitant housing prices, big and little tech could keep growing into the size their market opportunity offers. In this way, UAM commuting can help bring back the conditions that will moderate real estate prices on the peninsular and enable Silicon Valley to get its mojo back, so once again it can become the go to place to start a world beating venture.
Geographical Proximity
Mr. DeGoode suggest in his paper that UAM technology will allow the elite’s to avoid geographical proximity to everyone else and this will reduce the opportunity for shared experiences that are necessary to sustain democracy.
A social experiment to test that thesis has played out in San Francisco where elite tech workers moved in and lived alongside the low income workers that had been residents of neighborhoods for years. That did not go well for either party for the elite tech workers who were vilified or the residents who started protesting the corporate transit buses taking these tech workers to the office everyday, like the picket of the Google bus shown below:
By Chris Martin (Flickr user cjmartin) - Flickr - https://www.flickr.com/photos/cjmartin/11295749384, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31629284
In an article in the Verge called Byte Flight the author, Zoe Schiffer, describes the way the tech workers were vilified:
The tech workers in Silicon Valley know you want them gone. They knew it when you protested their buses. They knew it when you trashed their scooters. They definitely knew it when you scrawled “die techie scum” on the sidewalk.
Die Techie Scum
The same article in the Verge goes on to describe that the feeling was mutual:
But guess what? They don’t even want to be here! In fact, they’re already packing their bags. “I have no attachment to this city,” says a current Google employee who worked in the Mountain View office but has been remote since the pandemic. “It’s a very transient place — it’s a stop gap. If it was more affordable, if there weren’t homelessness issues, would I consider settling down here? Sure. But from my very first weeks in San Francisco I wanted to leave.”
A worker in Mountain View told The Verge they’ve left California — without even letting their boss know. “I love my job,” the worker says. “But I strongly dislike San Francisco, and now I don’t have to go back.”
The results of this experience in San Francisco suggests that moderating housing prices would do more to sustain a healthy democracy where everyone feels included, rather than close geographic proximity to one and other when income levels are so disparate.
Silicon Valley Exodus
A huge number of tech workers are thinking, why am I paying exorbitant rent when I can’t access the benefits of living in a vibrant, dense urban community while under COVID 19 restrictions which is making me stay at home, which could be anywhere. Surveys covering the subject of the Work from Home (WFH) phenomena has seen over 2/3rd of workers canvased, interested in re-locating their homes away from the Silicon Valley if they could keep their high-tech job by working on-line.
https://www.sfgate.com/living-in-sf/article/2-out-of-3-tech-workers-would-leave-SF-15289316.php
On the other side of the table, employers are looking to turn the WFH conditions of the COVID crisis into a permanent situation as they see a path where they can reduce their labor costs by recruiting from lower cost areas.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/19/how-silicon-valley-work-from-home-forever-will-hit-every-worker.html
62% of workers in the technology industry called it “very possible” for them to work from home — easily the highest of any industry.
A city like Sacramento could absorb ¼ of the Silicon Valley work force without having to increase its boundaries or suffer more urban sprawl. Sacramento has a median house price of $330,000 and is a 30 minute UAM flight away from the tech epicenter of Palo Alto. This makes Sacramento an attractive potential destination for the thousands of tech workers as they can work from home, yet easily be in their Silicon Valley office on a regular basis if UAM technology becomes available.
Dylan Hecklau is thinking along the same lines. His ad-tech employer, Jelli Inc., was dubious about letting people work from home before the pandemic hit. Now that employees have proven productive, its attitude has changed.
Hecklau, 32, is planning to take the money he would have spent on a Lake Tahoe vacation home and make a down payment on a permanent home in Sacramento, abandoning his $3,200-a-month rental in San Francisco. “With nothing keeping me here, I can’t justify paying the rent prices,” he says.
Why live in an expensive, traffic clogged environment like San Mateo, when all the attractions of that kind of environment are closed due to the COVID shelter in place ordinance?
Having access to your own backyard in a single-family home in Sacramento, all at a lower cost, suddenly seems very appealing, especially if you are a new family!
Densification and Affordable Home Construction
Densification is offered as an alternative that could help solve the high cost of housing in the Silicon Valley without suffering urban sprawl. 75% of the peninsular remains zoned for single family homes as that is how a lot of people with the means to do so, wish to live. That shows no sign of changing anytime soon as NIMBY push back against densification policy proposals suggests that “they” should go and densify “over there”. The COVOD 19 pandemic has also laid bare the weakness in the densification approach from a human health perspective, where extremely dense urban conurbations were some of the first to suffer during the pandemic and less densely populated, rural areas were less affected.
Apple, Google and Facebook have committed huge amounts of cash to solve the problem and these big three have committed $4.5 billion dollars to affordable housing projects, but at an estimated cost of $750,000 per home, these can in no stretch of the imagination be called low cost housing. One of the un-intended consequence of offering a housing “benefit” as part of a job might be to lock in lower performing employees. Managers might be less likely to fire a low performing employee if they know it will result in homelessness, which in turn could reduce the corporation’s performance as a whole.
The COVID 19 pandemic also lays bare the weaknesses of relying on corporate welfare instead of smart public policy. Losing your health insurance when you are laid off from your job in the middle of a health emergency like a pandemic is precisely when you need health coverage the most and has become a huge issue for the 40 million Americans who lost their jobs during the COVID 19 crisis. Adding housing to the problems caused by corporate layoffs could be a huge mistake and an example of how relying on corporate subsidized “affordable housing” might be bad public policy is vividly illustrated by the Emirates Airlines pink slip letter issued during the COVID 19 shut down of the airline industry:
“… you will be permitted to remain in your company provided accommodation or you will continue to receive a monthly accommodation allowance payment, until you can find away back to your home country”
A large number of Emirates Airlines employees were expatriates and when the COVID 19 pandemic shut down air travel, Emirates Airlines laid off about 30% of it’s staff. These workers had a short time to move back to their home countries as they were no longer allowed to live in the subsidized corporate housing provided by the airline in Dubai after they were laid off. Just like that, they were jobless and homeless.
Imagine what it would be like if the 40 million Americans who lost their jobs in the COVID 19 pandemic had been living in corporate subsidized “affordable” housing. Laid off workers could no longer stay in their corporate provided homes and would have become homeless on top of losing their job-related healthcare coverage. Homelessness would have come right in the middle of the worldwide pandemic with its’ stay at home orders, so where would these 40 million ex-workers have been able to stay at home?
Public Subsidies for Infrastructure
A “Greater Bay Area Air Metro” that could move 1.5 million people to work every day would need approximately 40,000 air vehicles that could all be privately funded. In comparison, the replacement Bay Bridge took years to build, cost over $6 billion and can only move 250,000 cars per day under near constant grid lock traffic conditions.
The only public money needed for an “Air Metro” would be to support a “Dollar Flight Club” with cap and trade funding used to subsidize low commuter flight ticket prices for low income workers. Funding could also be used to “financially back-stop” the establishment of flights for new commuter routes that would not normally be considered by a commercial operator, such as Yuba City to Palo Alto.
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. The Vertiport infrastructure needed for a “Greater Bay Area Air Metro” could be totally privately funded with the right state legislation.
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 allocate some of that automobile parking away from cars and towards the location of a Vertiport. To ensure that this mandate has public benefit for all, these Vertiports should be available for anyone to use, not just for the benefit of the tenants of the land.
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 and away from capr parking, also be allocated towards new buildings. A further inducement to get commuters out of cars, might be an additional incentive of extra land that can be converted away from car parking to buildings, if a threshold of employees commutes 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 out of car parking and use that space for additional buildings. The land owner is incentivized to install a Vertiport with the reward being those additional 2 acres can now be built upon, essentially turning low value car parking into land that at current prices, could be worth up to $10 million per acre. To incentivize the employer to get ¼ of their workforce to use the “Air Metro” to get to work, another 2 acres can be converted from car parking to office space if 25% or more of employees come to work via UAM. These additional 2 acres would free another $20 million worth of land that can be converted from low value car parking into high value work space, that can then be used to accommodate the further growth of the company in the Silicon Valley.
Conclusion
Mr. DeGood in his paper is painting a simplified picture of well paid professionals’ wants and desires. He implies that with AAM available, these elites will all decamp to the wilderness, living alone on remote mountaintops or behind fenced compounds in golf course-like estates.
What if that isn’t true? What if they will use AAM technology to live differently, but still gravitate toward communities, perhaps communities that are smaller, more manageable, and sustainable? These could be communities that they actually feel a part of and that this engenders more, not less civic involvement.
The bigger point is, new transportation paradigms are so impactful, with so many second-order effects, that one simply cannot declare what the outcome is going to be. Mr. DeGood makes no real attempt at even exploring this nor does he describe the aerial mobility paradigm shift for what it is – hugely complex and full of unknowns.
Our existing paradigm of “drive till it bleeds” housing development, supported by limited, land-based transit has resulted in unsustainable urban structures. Public rail transit does not appear to be a cost-effective solution and Mr. DeGood does not offer an alternative to automobile commuting or densification.
In stark contrast, the promise of Urban Air Mobility and Advanced Air Mobility give an inkling on how we might begin to work towards improving the quality of our environment as well as strengthen our democracy to usher in an era of the “human centered city”. The public utility of UAM and AAM can be made available for everyone to use at a far higher speed, lower cost and without the land use issues facing other public transit technology being built today. UAM proponents like UAMCAH show that if UAM and AAM technology deployment is backed up with the right public policy, governments can ensure that “Flying Cars” are not just for the elite, but can be available for all and can be a tool used to address the housing affordability and economic inequality crisis that is threatening our democracy.