Urban Movement Labs publishes AAM primer in partnership with the City of Los Angeles

The City of Los Ange­les, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Urban Move­ment Labs, has pub­lished ‘Inte­grat­ing Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty — A Primer for Cities’, which high­lights steps to con­sid­er dur­ing ini­tial plan­ning phas­es.

Elec­tric air­craft are on track to be cer­ti­fied by the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion (FAA) in 2025, and the primer doc­u­ments how UML and the City of Los Ange­les have approached the top­ic, pro­vid­ing a frame­work for oth­er cities to fol­low.

The City of Los Ange­les col­lab­o­rat­ed with the World Eco­nom­ic Forum to cre­ate the Prin­ci­ples of the Urban Sky in 2020.

World Eco­nom­ic Forum pub­lish­es sev­en key prin­ci­ples to help realise Urban Air Mobil­i­ty in cities

While a for­mal pol­i­cy response has not tak­en place, the AAM part­ner­ship assures that the city will not be start­ing from scratch and will have a devel­oped under­stand­ing of AAM tech­nol­o­gy, impacts, and oppor­tu­ni­ties.

The primer pro­vides a review of the state of the AAM indus­try in tech­nol­o­gy devel­op­ment and emerg­ing pol­i­cy at the fed­er­al lev­el. A ‘flight plan’ sum­maris­es steps the City of Los Ange­les took in lay­ing a foun­da­tion for future pol­i­cy devel­op­ment.

UML advanced air mobil­i­ty fel­low Clint Harp­er stat­ed: “We have learned that AAM will inter­sect many key depart­ments with­in a city. This will require care­ful col­lab­o­ra­tion from trans­porta­tion plan­ners, land use plan­ners, air­port author­i­ties, fire depart­ments, build­ing and safe­ty author­i­ties, util­i­ties providers, emer­gency man­agers and eco­nom­ic devel­op­ers, but most impor­tant­ly, the com­mu­ni­ty.”

Los Ange­les may­or Eric Garcetti added: “Los Ange­les is lead­ing the clean trans­porta­tion rev­o­lu­tion, chart­ing a path to a future city that is bet­ter con­nect­ed and less con­gest­ed. With Urban Move­ment Labs, we are also cre­at­ing a mod­el for how AAM can help cities to reduce com­mut­ing times and cre­ate green trans­porta­tion options.”

Los Ange­les Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion inter­im gen­er­al man­ag­er Con­nie Llanos con­tin­ued: “In Los Ange­les we are build­ing a 21st cen­tu­ry trans­porta­tion sys­tem that invites cre­ativ­i­ty and inno­va­tion to help us solve real world prob­lems for all Ange­lenos.

“The depart­ment is ready to col­lab­o­rate with Fed­er­al and State part­ners, the pri­vate sec­tor, and com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers to ensure that we are pre­pared to inte­grate aer­i­al mobil­i­ty into our trans­porta­tion land­scape, safe­ly, sus­tain­ably, and pro­vid­ing the max­i­mum ben­e­fit to our com­mu­ni­ties.”

See the full report here.