I'm an LA resident and there's not many kinds of businesses I think should be categorically banned, but helicopter transit is one of them. It's a public nuisance. I will regularly need to interrupt phone conversations to let a helicopter pass over, which is sometimes impossible when they decide to hover (though this is usually police helicopters).
Hah. Trying living in much of the Washington, DC area. The notion of a highway chase is mostly ridiculous here, but one has plenty of VIPs hurrying about by helicopter, and now and police searches.
I was astounded at the frequency, low altitude, and cacophony of police helicopter missions in Fresno when I spent about 6 weeks at @dmpayton's house. Like, WTF. It feels like they just want to remind you that they exist every couple hours.
They were frequently low enough to be deafening or painful to the ears. On several occasions, I was able to feel the ground effect.
One of them was so low (I estimate, based on my fairly humble amount of experience at drone flights, that it was around 80-100ft, perhaps briefly even lower than that) that it blew all of the leaves off of a tree (this was in November, when they had already turned). The next morning a bunch of neighborhood kids had a ball playing in the enormous pile of fresh crunchy leaves.
I'm confident that the number of helicopter missions in Fresno can be reduced by 95% with no noticeable impact on public safety.
Suppose that there is a helicopter overhead that you (and the five thousand people around you) would pay a dollar to get rid of. If you tax that flight $5000 and distribute it to the 5000 people who could hear that helicopter, then you get that dollar and you're just as happy as if that flight didn't exist. If you tax that flight $10,000, and distribute it to the 5000 people, then you get two dollars, making you happier than in the scenario where the flight didn't take place.
Obviously, it's impossible to give that money to the people who heard the helicopter, but if you amortize all the flights in the area (say, all of LA) over all the people who live there, and reduce their taxes by that amount, then financially it works out the same. That still leaves some problems (complexity in setting a new tax on helicopter flights, differing value on not-having-helicopter-flights, difficulty of estimation, and so on), and many people want to discourage the mentality of "you can throw money at a problem to get rid of it", but conceptually it seems plausible for taxing the flight to be better than banning it entirely.
This misses the differential impact of the disruption on different people. Freelancers that do audio recording, for example, may need to throw out and redo some of their work when it gets interrupted by a helicopter flyby. You either need to identify these people and five them a higher proportion of the tax revues to compensate, or price your tax/redistribution high enough that these high-value individuals are fairly compensated.
I don't think that making a luxury service more expensive will discourage use, unless we can make each flight cost tens of thousands of dollars.
I'd rather just ban assholery than create a steep asshole tax. It doesn't bother me that a few rich people will have to wait in traffic like everyone else (or better - stop traveling for cross-town meetings and take a phone call!).
The point isn't to discourage use per se. The point is to force the entity producing negative externalities to pay for the damages they are incurring. If the business is still economical to run after these costs, it should be run, and the money can be kept to reduce taxes, pay for other noise abatement, etc.
If it's agreed that the behavior is damaging, why allow it? If you take the slippery slope down, then you could simply pay off any negative behavior like rape or murder.
The slipper slope goes in the opposite direction too. All behavior causes damages (negative externalities) to someone somewhere, but we don't outlaw all behavior.
There is a pretty well developed theory of econ & law of when it makes sense to have financial penalties and when it makes sense to have criminal penalties. I don't think I could do justice to it in this comment box, but suffice it to say, "only criminal penalties, no financial ones" is wrong.
You don't know what is and is not economical. Pick a price that will reduce average taxes on affected citizens enough that they are indifferent if the flights occur or not. If that price is too high to make the business economical, it will not occur, which is economically efficient.
Should we place a tax on murder? Certainly there's a payoff at which point, 50% of the voters will shrug their shoulders, and say: "Well, if someone's willing to pay 5 million dollars to want someone dead, surely they've got a great reason to... My property taxes just went down by half a percentage point!"
Not sure the target market is for this since it's between airports. The Palo Alto to SFO one doesn't really help you get into the city because much of the traffic you'd have to drive through is between SFO and downtown. I guess they couldn't get rights to land somewhere downtown (after a bit of research it actually looks like there are no active heliports in SF except one at UCSF in the Dogpatch. Color me unsurprised.) Maybe this is useful if you are really really rich and want to skip some traffic between South Bay and the airport, but doesn't make much sense to me.
The only thing that is moderately interesting to someone that's not a billionaire are the flights to Napa. At first I thought it was competing with some of the wine tasting buses that drive up and back but they only do 2 flights a week (Friday-Monday). That implies a weekend trip. I guess that make sense.
Overall, seems not super useful. I guess I am not the target demographic.
> The Palo Alto to SFO one doesn't really help you get into the city because much of the traffic you'd have to drive through is between SFO and downtown
I don't think they target PA<->SF traffic. This looks more like a last mile connection for people who want to get to Palo Alto, from outside of bay area. Given how many VCs are there, there's some potential market for it.
Still, PAO is not close to Stanford nor Sand Hill offices if you have to drive through congestion to get there. It would be faster to Uber from SFO to Palo Alto via 280 once you factor in getting on/off your shared helicopter ride.
I met a guy who commuted daily from Hollister to PAO with a plane he flew. With offices a bit further north, I could see SFO being the best option for him.
I've flown a Cessna 182 into KPAO from Livermore for a couple of VC meetings. It takes about 20 minutes (mostly taxiing time). At rush hour getting between downtown and the airport (and waiting for the Lyft to get to the airport) usually took longer than the flight. Still better than a 2 hour drive though.
Building a heliport or just using a yacht with a helipad in the bay just off of SF would be cool. They could use a speed boat to ferry to shore, plus less concern about noise.
Just had a look. I am taking the wife to Napa on Sat. for an event and thought this would rock (vs 2-3 of driving). They do SFO to Napa but not on Sat. Oh well.
The pricing for this actually looks much more reasonable than I'd have expected. Last (and only time) I chartered a helicopter it was back to Hong Kong from Macau, and it ran me ~$850.00 USD. Palo Alto to Napa is "only" like $275 with these people.
I find it depressing that non-emergency helicopters are legal. The amount of noise they create to transport a few people ends up being a net negative on quality of life.
HAha. You think non-emergency helicopters are a problem?
Wait until everyone and their mom is getting deliveries from thousands of drones. It'll be like in a soccer stadium with vuvuzelas outside.
Actually need to go PA to right near OAK to SFO within just a few hours in the next few days. If they had a 9:30pm OAK->SFO I would have probably booked it at that price. $215 compared to $100 with Lyft...
If you're flying airport to airport, I'd expect an airplane (King Air for 6 pax, Cirrus SR22 for 2 pax) would be cheaper, quieter, and safer. Although maybe it's easier to get into SFO using a helicopter instead of a General Aviation airplane?
SFO would be much easier to get into since helicopters are typically cleared direct to the helipad without sequencing for a runway. The smaller airports would be no problem though.
I've long held that 'entrepreneur-friendly' investors on the Peninsula should have some kind of Heli-shuttle that runs up the western-most side (aka follow 280 for the most part) of the Peninsula to San Francisco or sponsor some kind of vice-versa for city-based founders.
Instead we're left with the alternative of wasting half a day or more running down and up. I get that you shouldn't hate the player but hate the game but in this case the game kind of sucks and that's just for local folks.
I used it 2 times in Brazil (I think their first market) and really enjoy the whole process.
I used it to go to the airport. Friday night with traffic, you need almost 2 hours to reach the airport from my home. Using that I could do it in 45mn door to door. (20mn ride to the helipad, 10mn wait, 15mn ride)
You can also enjoy the view which is a big plus.
46 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 79.2 ms ] threadI was astounded at the frequency, low altitude, and cacophony of police helicopter missions in Fresno when I spent about 6 weeks at @dmpayton's house. Like, WTF. It feels like they just want to remind you that they exist every couple hours.
They were frequently low enough to be deafening or painful to the ears. On several occasions, I was able to feel the ground effect.
One of them was so low (I estimate, based on my fairly humble amount of experience at drone flights, that it was around 80-100ft, perhaps briefly even lower than that) that it blew all of the leaves off of a tree (this was in November, when they had already turned). The next morning a bunch of neighborhood kids had a ball playing in the enormous pile of fresh crunchy leaves.
I'm confident that the number of helicopter missions in Fresno can be reduced by 95% with no noticeable impact on public safety.
Obviously, it's impossible to give that money to the people who heard the helicopter, but if you amortize all the flights in the area (say, all of LA) over all the people who live there, and reduce their taxes by that amount, then financially it works out the same. That still leaves some problems (complexity in setting a new tax on helicopter flights, differing value on not-having-helicopter-flights, difficulty of estimation, and so on), and many people want to discourage the mentality of "you can throw money at a problem to get rid of it", but conceptually it seems plausible for taxing the flight to be better than banning it entirely.
This solution pays me for my inconvenience. It doesn't prevent the inconvenience in the first place or from happening again.
I'd rather just ban assholery than create a steep asshole tax. It doesn't bother me that a few rich people will have to wait in traffic like everyone else (or better - stop traveling for cross-town meetings and take a phone call!).
Leave low altitude flight to emergency services.
There is a pretty well developed theory of econ & law of when it makes sense to have financial penalties and when it makes sense to have criminal penalties. I don't think I could do justice to it in this comment box, but suffice it to say, "only criminal penalties, no financial ones" is wrong.
Just ban the bloody things outright.
The only thing that is moderately interesting to someone that's not a billionaire are the flights to Napa. At first I thought it was competing with some of the wine tasting buses that drive up and back but they only do 2 flights a week (Friday-Monday). That implies a weekend trip. I guess that make sense.
Overall, seems not super useful. I guess I am not the target demographic.
I hope we see more of this type of alternative options...opt-out of TSA (until its so big it gets attention), P2P, nimble, small-scale.
I don't think they target PA<->SF traffic. This looks more like a last mile connection for people who want to get to Palo Alto, from outside of bay area. Given how many VCs are there, there's some potential market for it.
1) SFO to Downtown PA: 30 mins 2) Palo Alto Airport to Downtown PA: 15 minutes
for $250 one way? Better be some pretty good VCs/Lawyers to pay an extra ~$400 round trip.
I'm not saying that this is a good business and they'll have lots of clients. But there's some possibility of it.
Instead we're left with the alternative of wasting half a day or more running down and up. I get that you shouldn't hate the player but hate the game but in this case the game kind of sucks and that's just for local folks.