Should new neighborhoods include super drone zones?

eVTOL air taxis are a few years away, just as they were at Oshkosh 2018 (see Transitioning to electric flight (lectures at Oshkosh)). The static displays that appeared at Oshkosh 2025, e.g., Joby’s, seemed too large to fit comfortably into our car-oriented world. The U.S. population keeps growing, thanks to the miracle of immigration, and developers keep developing more suburban sprawl. Should each new reasonably elite neighborhood include a “super drone zone” where an eVTOL air taxi can land and depart without annoying or endangering anyone?

(Also, if eVTOLs start to work as advertised does that mean that the rulers of the U.S. will stop making any attempt to make surface transportation tolerable? If elites go everywhere by private air taxi why would they care that peasants must endure a Mumbai-/Delhi-like experience when they try to go somewhere by “surface car”?)

So that the zone need not be a fenced-off blight when not in use perhaps it could be a “smart LZ” in which a low perimeter fence of lights begins to flash when an eVTOL is inbound (i.e., the inbound eVTOL robot or human pilot can activate the “move away from the pad” lights). The same fence can be equipped with cameras and other sensors to detect the presence of humans and other obstacles and warn the eVTOL if the landing zone isn’t clear.

Here’s the Toyota-funded Joby in the new-for-2025 Toyota booth at EAA AirVenture:

(This was one of the places where I heard about the FAA’s new-since-November-2024 religion of productivity and consequent hope for certification.)

Note that the only electric aircraft that was apparently working well enough to be included in the daily airshow was BETA’s conventional (runwary-required) takeoff machine. (See A visit to BETA Technologies in Burlington, Vermont (eVTOL aircraft) for the 2023 status and BETA Technologies update from Oshkosh 2025.)