What is it about?
For over a century, road networks have underpinned modern economies and urban life. A new transport layer is now forming in low-altitude airspace, with drones, air taxis, and other aerial vehicles entering this space in growing numbers. Yet unlike ground transport, this airspace currently lacks structured corridors or shared rules. This paper proposes that low-altitude public air routes, designed as preplanned shared corridors, should be developed as foundational infrastructure. A central argument is that the planning principles, governance models, and investment logic refined through decades of ground road network development offer highly valuable references for organizing this emerging aerial domain. These air routes connect to the surface through distributed take-off and landing sites, creating an integrated air-ground transport system. The analysis suggests that such infrastructure merits public investment as a priority, with socioeconomic returns potentially comparable to those of conventional road construction.
Featured Image
Photo by Denys Nevozhai on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Historically, the development of structured transport networks has played a central role in enabling economic growth, from early road systems to modern highway networks. Today, a new transport layer is taking shape in low-altitude airspace, and a familiar infrastructure question arises: how should this network be planned, governed, and built? This work addresses that question at a pivotal moment. Countries around the world are investing in aerial vehicle technology, yet systematic planning of the route infrastructure these vehicles will rely on remains limited. The paper offers a framework rooted in proven ground-transport principles that can serve as a reference across different regulatory and geographic contexts. The experience of road network development suggests that proactive infrastructure planning tends to be far more effective and less costly than reactive management of congested, unstructured systems. Early and thoughtful investment in low-altitude public air-route infrastructure can contribute to building integrated three-dimensional transport systems that help alleviate growing surface transportation pressures while supporting broader sustainability and environmental goals.
Perspectives
This perspective draws on the viewpoint articulated by Prof. Liao Xiaohan, the corresponding author of this paper. Low-altitude airspace is a finite and valuable resource. As aerial vehicles multiply rapidly, allowing each operator to generate individual flight trajectories, as is current practice worldwide, risks fragmenting this resource in an inefficient and disorderly manner. Public air routes offer a fundamentally different approach: by consolidating operations into preplanned, shared corridors designed for multiple aircraft types, multiple users, and different missions, they enable intensive and coordinated utilization of airspace, much as public road networks organize ground traffic far more efficiently than uncoordinated individual paths. This paper further proposes that, like roads on the ground, these sky roads can be treated as fixed assets with tradable property rights, managed through mechanisms including virtual road maintenance, traffic toll collection, and safety supervision. What makes this proposition particularly actionable is that the starting point is not zero. The long history and mature technologies of ground transportation, from hierarchical network design to public governance and standardized traffic rules, offer highly valuable references for this new domain. The paper reflects a broader conviction that transport civilization is beginning to extend into three dimensions, and that the extensive knowledge accumulated from ground road infrastructure can serve as an important guide for building integrated air-ground transport systems. It is hoped that the work encourages researchers and planners worldwide to explore how structured infrastructure planning can help better organize and utilize low-altitude airspace as a shared public resource.
Hongbo HE
University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Public air routes for low-altitude economies: Priority infrastructure beneficially associated with ground roads, Communications in Transportation Research, December 2025, Tsinghua University Press,
DOI: 10.1016/j.commtr.2025.100228.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
