Vehicle design dictates the geography of urban air mobility accessibility

The advent of Urban Air Mobility (UAM) demands a fundamental re-evaluation of the reciprocal relationship between emerging vehicle technologies and the established urban form. Beyond the immediate challenges of engineering optimisation, this study posits that electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft design parameters function as primary determinants of metropolitan accessibility, equity, and spatial structure. By developing an integrated infrastructure-cost framework applied to 283,647 building footprints in Shanghai, we systematically trace how seemingly technical choices, specifically wingspan and seating capacity—cascade through the rigid constraints of the built environment to produce profound, often unanticipated societal outcomes. The empirical analysis reveals a decisive “spatial filtering” mechanism: as vehicle wingspan increases from 6 to 16 m, feasible vertiport sites decline by 75.7 percent, with aggregate network capacity collapsing by 93.0 percent. Crucially, this attrition is disproportionately concentrated in dense, high-value central districts, effectively forcing larger aircraft to the urban periphery. These findings challenge the prevailing technology-centric discourse, demonstrating that the accumulated legacy of urban morphology—building codes and land use patterns unrelated to aviation—acts as a binding constraint on technological deployment. Consequently, the interaction between vehicle and infrastructure dictates the economic geography of the system. We find that optimised, compact Multirotor configurations achieve costs of $0.063 per passenger-kilometre, drastically undercutting larger winged architectures not merely due to energy efficiency, but through superior infrastructure compatibility.