Hop, Skip, Go by John Rossant

Author:John Rossant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

It sounds unlikely, in the near term, that an air taxi service would reach a scale sufficient to improve the flow of ground traffic in a major city. Commuters in the world’s big cities number in the millions, and most of them drive cars. Could an air service make a dent in that?

For decades, mathematicians and engineers have been meeting at conferences and colloquiums to discuss the dynamics of traffic. They never seem to reach a consensus. What causes so-called ghost jams7, for example? That’s when you’re driving down a highway at normal speed, and next thing you know, traffic is paralyzed. You creep forward for a few frustrating minutes and then, in an instant, find yourself traveling at full speed again. You look for an accident or a problematic on-ramp. But the jam just seemed to happen, and then, just as quickly, vanish.

Some researchers theorize that the phenomenon follows the mathematics of shock wave propulsion. Drivers hit the brakes, maybe to rubberneck, and that deceleration moves backward in cascading waves, until all forward momentum is extinguished. Others compare the dynamics of car travel to that of viscous liquids such as honey. Theories abound. But one point of agreement is that traffic does not follow a linear model: If you take 10 percent of the cars off the highway, traffic does not speed up by the same amount. The impact might be much greater.

This is the point Mark Moore is eager to make. He argues that if air taxis bring about even a 2 or 3 percent drop in rush hour traffic, it could improve the flow by 10 or 20 percent.

However, if traffic theorists, using models of viscous liquids or shock waves, can make a convincing case for flying taxis, game theory might offer a counterargument. Planners, after all, must calculate not only the first-day impact of a new element, whether a new bridge, bike lane, or air service. They also have to anticipate how people will respond to it. If new air taxis reduce traffic jams by 10 to 20 percent, could it be that more drivers will be lured back from public transport to their cars? It’s anybody’s guess.

But even if the air taxis don’t revolutionize traffic, they play to a key constituency: the powerful. Put yourself in the position of New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio. He meets with banking titans, film producers, and tech executives. These big shots could bring in millions of dollars in investment and create jobs. He wants them to pick New York and not London or LA. Yet if they fly into Newark or LaGuardia or, heaven forbid, JFK, many of them will have endured not only cramped and backward airports, but a miserable trek, in a cab or limo, all the way to Manhattan. It may be their freshest memory when they appear at his door—the worst welcome mat imaginable.

If these same people visit LA and there’s a functioning air network, even in its infancy, it could be an entirely different experience.

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