Solutions that put people first.

Advanced Air Mobility

Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) is quickly coming out of the future and into the present, but our infrastructure, policy, and planning strategies are still catching up. Vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) vehicles offer legitimate solutions to transportation problems, but like anything that flies, they need somewhere to land—and careful integration into our existing transportation network will be crucial to success.

Enter vertiports. Strip away the “flying” part, and AAM vertiport planning starts to look a lot like the transportation work we already do every day. Our internally-funded research has always enabled us to build playbooks for emerging technologies like autonomous passenger vehicles, autonomous freight, and ride-hailing companies (Uber, Lyft, etc.), and we’re doing the same for AAM.

Between drawing from aspects of our transportation planning practices and our research efforts, we enable our clients to stay ahead of the curve and develop holistic surface transportation connections to air travel.

Our Expertise

Clients come to us to:

• Understand Regional Demand: Use big data and regional travel demand models to unpack the characteristics of trips happening today, predict travel patterns in the future, and highlight key destinations and regions of interest.
• Identify Suitable Vertiport Sites: Locate and assess potential sites for vertiport suitability specific to service type such as passenger travel, emergency services, and goods movement. By examining indicators like user accessibility, supporting infrastructure, land use, travel market conditions, and associated regulations, we help our clients narrow down opportunity sites.
• Navigate Transportation-Related Policies and Regulations: Guide clients through intersecting webs of local, regional, and federal policies around multimodal transportation operations and street design. We stay on top of changing legal requirements for transportation planning and engineering—like CEQA in California and NEPA nationally—as well as directives from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that state and local entities must navigate.

Why We’re Trusted

Our team has been working with AAM industry pioneers since 2022 to develop AAM and vertiport implementation strategies, and for nearly a decade on other emerging technologies. Below are just a few examples of our work on AAM and other innovations.

• Supernal Advanced Air Mobility Strategy: We supported Supernal’s City Activation team in key work streams intended to help them reach specific go-to-market goals in Los Angeles. The project included analyzing vertiport site suitability in LA, authoring a study on the transportation-related requirements for vertiport implementation, and customer journey storytelling to better understand the range of potential customers’ experiences.
• Solano County Development Project: We helped a mid-sized city in Solano County, California explore the integration of AAM into their multimodal transportation network. Our assessment took into account the latest federal guidance, airspace viability, processing capacity, technology constraints, and market trends.
• Uber’s Future of the Curb Study: We worked with Uber in San Francisco to define concepts and metrics that allowed us to quantify curb activity, develop data-supported findings about curb space allocation, and make recommendations about how to improve curb space productivity.
• Automated Freight Transportation Systems: We teamed up with Tioga Group on NCHRP Research Report 1028 to identify potential impacts of connected and automated freight movement technologies on existing policies and practices, and to outline how state and local agencies can enable these technologies for the future.

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