Exploring the socio-spatial pattern of noise impact of advanced air mobility – A case study in West Yorkshire, England

Using West Yorkshire in England as the case study area, this study assesses the potential noise impact of advanced air mobility (AAM) at reginal scale, and explores how the impact is distributed across different socio-economic groups. Using agglomerative hierarchical clustering (AHC), possible vertiport locations were identified based on commute travel demand. Then, two types of flying routes were tested: one prioritises distance reduction and one prioritises noise mitigation, each tested with 3 distances of noise footprints. Statistics of people exposed to the potential AAM noise were made with and without considering exposure to existing road and rail noise. The results show that AAM noise is likely to affect a large proportion of the population in West Yorkshire, and most of the affected population are not currently exposed to road and/or rail noise above 55dB LAeq, 16h. AAM noise is also likely to make the social inequality in transport noise exposure in West Yorkshire even worse. Using noise-priority routes seems to slightly reduce the inequality. There is a risk that the more deprived communities who are already suffering from more transport noise will bear disproportionally more burden of the new noise introduced by AAM.