I can't believe seriously arguing for oversized quadcopters as a mass transport alternative.
In Manhattan? I honestly would. If it were a nation, it would be the 22nd-largest economy. Any disruption to that system is massively expensive.
I'm not saying we shouldn't do the math. But we also shouldn't be reaching conclusions without attempting it.
This isn’t in the same category as burying a new train line. I lived around just the Hudson Yard water and electric expansions when those happened. It was years of increased noise, traffic and litigation.
Straw man. Nobody claimed these were existential threats.
OP said "I wouldn't be surprised if cost/passenger over useful lifetime still shakes out better for the trains." I'm saying I wouldn't be surprised if the opposite came out–take the costs of the disruption and time value of money into account, and building a new train line anywhere in Manhattan is a worse use of resources than (a) increasing capacity on existing lines, a veritable forest of low-hanging fruit or even (b) eVTOLs.
I don't know how the economics in the electric VTOL era works out, but the thing about air travel vs train travel is that in order for the train to be useful, you have to build tracks from every train station to every other train station to have perfect routability, which is expensive. However, for a helipad, once you've built the helipad it automatically connects to all other helipads in range.
Of course on a serious EVTOL you got variable pitch props and tilting rotors (basic 4 rotor design is inefficient just doesn't scale).
Avionics vs modern AEB, ESP, etc likely on par. Inverter redundancy way more important on EVTOL, but EVs have redundancy too.
At least try to show curiosity about what they want to solve.
Hypothesis: people aren't familiar with New York's trains. It's a world-class network the likes of which we don't otherwise have in North America. (Sorry Toronto.) So when they see eVTOLs, they emotionally map it to their local trainless context.
In Ireland, everyone thinks it's pretty ridiculous that there's no train to Dublin Airport (all going well, it will finally have one in 2036 or so, after _many_ false starts). Dublin's a city of about 1.5 million people. It's pretty incomprehensible that a city ten times the size wouldn't have one.
EDIT: Oh, wait, misread, I thought you meant a direct train from Grand Central to the airport.
It’s a single, low-bullshit transfer. Frankfurt Airport also requires a connection for terminals 2 and 3 [1].
[1] https://www.frankfurt-airport.com/en/transport-and-parking/t...
You have 10000 people who need to do this trip every hour, how will you manage that with this? It can’t scale.
In the end normal people will be stuck without proper transport, while a tiny majority will fly around in comfort.