Hisham Sarwar
Imagine travelling from your home to work that would normally occupy the better parts of two hours-in only 15 minutes. What if you could save the four hour round-trip of your every day? Or imagine reducing your hourly commute into a matter of minutes.
It’s very common for people around the world to waste long hours on the road. The commute time between work and home takes half a million hours of productivity of every single day. In many global megacities, the problem is even worst. There is a lot of demand to radically improve the urban mobility and give people back their lost time of their daily commutes. Looking at the commute pain these people around the world feel, technology experts have made it their core mission to alleviate transportation congestion on the ground.
The city of Dubai has placed forward a new plan to set up a passenger-carrying drone to ease the urban congestion. The country’s road and transport agency has announced at the World Government Summit that a passenger service will be introduced early this summer. It will start in July along predetermined routes by using Ehang 184 autonomous quad-opener electric drone.
This is a kind of drone that can easily carry one individual with a maximum weight of 220 pounds. On one charge it can cover up a distance of 31 miles at a speed of 100 mph. It seems it is intended to help people living in urban cities. The drones will be monitored by Dubai officials and will be piloted from a centralized command center. According to the authorities, the flying vehicles are already being tested in Dubai skies.
Dubai is known for providing an infrastructure for supporting transportation technology. This kind of system will likely have significant advantages over hefty infrastructure approaches such as roads, rail, bridges, and subways. This initiative can form the basis of an extensive and distributed network of vertiports i.e. VTOL hubs that will take multiple takeoffs, landing pads and charging infrastructure into account.
