The Potential of emerging transport modes; Raid-Hailing and Urban Air Mobility

Improvement Information and communication technology change our daily life. We get the benefit of our commuting activities. The concepts of peer production, also known as a sharing economy, was adopted in the transport sectors. One of the systems that emerge in Indonesia currently is raid-hailing or online-based transport, including motorcycle based or car-based vehicles.

This system connects the service, which is offered by a company, to individuals through the internet. This business model exists not only in the transportation industry but also in many sectors of industry, including hotels, restaurants, ticketing, and e-commerce.

The existence of raid-hailing reduces the share of conventional mode transport, such as “ojek” and taxi conventional. It caused the problem in many cities, where there is resistance from conventional taxi drivers because of raid-hailing shrinkage their income. However, these modes of transport claimed to increase the accessibility of public transportation as raid hailing connects the first mile and the last mile of the trip, from home to station and reverse.

Moreover, transport planners and experts try to develop Urban Air Mobility (UAM), which can fly over the air space, such as a flying taxi like in star trek movies or other science fiction movies. Many companies have interested in and research in Urban Air Mobility (UAM), like Airbus, Lilium, NASA, and Uber Air, regarding the acceptance of this mode in urban areas.

The concept of this mode is similar to the helicopter, which can take-off and landing vertically, and the business concept is the same as raid hailing. Our last research investigates the potential of UAM to be applied in Greater Jakarta, using mode choice experiments. We found that the user might be only high-income people, and it is used for long-distance travel.

Different like raid hailing (ODT), the value of travel time savings (VTTS), which refers to the benefit from reduced travel time costs. The VTTS of Urban Air Mobility (UAM) increases when the distance and income increase. It means that UAM can be adopted, and it would be suitable only for high-income people with a long-distance trip or might be for people who have a business trip (Fig 1).

Fig 1. VTTS UAM

Indeed public transport infrastructure still needs more improvement, but look to another potential for a future mode of transport is essential to adjust our transport planning. Before this system grows, the government need to prepare regulations, services standard, and security. As we experienced, which what happens in raid hailing, the regulation is not clear whether raid hailing is part of public transport or not.

In the future, the adoption of UAM will grow significantly. This system only requires a place for take-off and landing, in which high rise buildings can be used. Regarding the price, this system will be more expensive than taxis and other modes, as many companies have developed the vehicles of UAM.

In addition, other mobility transport concepts will be more advanced, such as the concept of mobility as a Service (MAAS), which company offers bundling of several modes of transport. Autonomous car and electric car-sharing. This future mode of transport should be anticipated so that our infrastructure can adapt to emerging transportation.

To read full paper can be seen here:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0965856421001713