Survey data on public perceptions towards flying cars and flying taxi services

An online survey was conducted to evaluate public perceptions towards an emerging transportation technology, namely the flying car, which is expected to join the existing traffic fleet within the following decades. Responses from 692 survey participants were collected. Approximately 84% of the participants were from the United States, and the remaining 16% were from the rest of the world. The data resulting from the survey include several aspects of public perceptions towards flying cars, as for example: willingness to use and pay for flying cars; willingness to use and pay for flying taxi services; perceptions towards potential benefits and concerns arising from the future use of flying cars; perceptions towards considering residence relocation; and perceptions towards potential security measures to improve operational safety of flying cars. In addition, information relating to several dimensions of driving and travel behaviours and habits, and socio-demographic information of the participants were also collected. The dataset can be used as a baseline to design future surveys on Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) and flying cars, and to compare consumer perceptions across different regions and during different time periods.


a b s t r a c t
An online survey was conducted to evaluate public perceptions towards an emerging transportation technology, namely the flying car, which is expected to join the existing traffic fleet within the following decades. Responses from 692 survey participants were collected. Approximately 84% of the participants were from the United States, and the remaining 16% were from the rest of the world. The data resulting from the survey include several aspects of public perceptions towards flying cars, as for example: willingness to use and pay for flying cars; willingness to use and pay for flying taxi services; perceptions towards potential benefits and concerns arising from the future use of flying cars; perceptions towards considering residence relocation; and perceptions towards potential security measures to improve operational safety of flying cars. In addition, information relating to several dimensions of driving and travel behaviours and habits, and socio-demographic information of the participants were also collected. The dataset can be used as a baseline to design future surveys on Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) and flying cars, and to compare consumer perceptions across different regions and during different time periods.

Value of the Data
• The dataset provides one of the earliest insights into public perception towards flying car technologies. To the best of the author's knowledge, this survey was the first of its kind. As public perception towards this emerging technology continues to evolve, the insights offered by this dataset can serve as a benchmark for future studies to draw comparison and track the direction of evolution. • The dataset can serve as a baseline for designing or comparing future studies on flying cars and Advanced Air Mobility (AAM), as well as other emerging transportation technologies. As additional information regarding flying cars and AAM technologies become available to the public, future surveys can incorporate the up-to-date information (e.g., purchase cost, cost of a ride in ridesharing framework, safety and security features offered). Furthermore, to derive policy recommendations, questions focused on evaluating the potential effectiveness of the most recent technical breakthroughs (AAM traffic management systems, operational noise level, redundancy offered by the AAM vehicle for enhanced safety) can be added. • The dataset may be analysed using several methodological approaches (e.g., statistical and econometric methods, machine learning, and deep learning algorithms). • This dataset can be leveraged by professors and educators to illustrate the use of statistical and econometric methods to analyse survey-collected data.

Data Description
A brief overview of the topics covered in the survey questionnaire is presented in Table 1 .
The dataset contains responses from 692 respondents, 584 of which are collected from the United States, 50 from India, and the remaining 58 are from seventeen different countries. These seventeen countries are: Australia; Canada; Dominican Republic; Greece; Iran; Nepal; New Zealand; Nigeria; Oman; Qatar; Saudi Arabia; Sri Lanka; Switzerland; Thailand; Turkey; United Arab Emirates; and United Kingdom. The socio-demographic characteristics of the respondents   Table 3 List of available files in the dataset.

File name Description Format
Dataset Complete dataset consisting of responses from 692 survey participants. The first row represents the variable header, identifying the coded variables (starting from X0 to X112). The remaining rows represent responses from each survey participant. .csv

Dataset Description
Complete description of the dataset. It consists of the questions (as presented to the survey participants), and how each response is numerically coded within the dataset.
.pdf are summarized in Table 2 . As it can be seen from Table 2 , 56.9% of the respondents are male. In terms of marital status, 23.5% of the respondents are married and 69.1% are single. With regard to the educational background of the respondents, 49.1% of the respondents have a college degree and 22.9% a post graduate degree. List of the available files in the dataset and corresponding description is presented in Table 3 . Full details of the questionnaire and the resulting variables is readily available in Mendeley Data repository.

Experimental Design, Materials and Methods
The survey was conducted through the online survey administration platform "SurveyMonkey", and was disseminated by 35 students and employees from the University at Buffalo. The survey was open throughout the month of March in 2017. The 35 survey collectors gathered responses from 692 survey participants.
The questionnaire was organized in a segmented fashion. In the first section, the respondents were asked about their level of familiarity with modern vehicle safety features, and whether they currently own or previously owned any vehicles with such features. In the second section, the respondents were asked about their willingness to use flying cars, and how much they are willing to pay to purchase a flying car once they become available. They were also asked whether they are interested about using flying taxi services, and how much they would be willing to pay for such service as compared to existing ground-based ridesharing services such as Uber and Lyft. The next sets of questions focused on concerns and benefits that may arise from the future use of flying cars. This was followed by several questions focusing on the respondents' willingness to use flying cars for different trip purposes, and questions inquiring whether the respondents would be willing to consider relocating their residences when flying cars become available for use. Then the respondents were asked about their perception towards a number of hypothetical security measures to improve safety and security of flying car operations. Finally, the survey concluded with several driving and travel behaviour and habit related questions, followed by socio-demographic characteristics of the respondents.
To capture public perceptions, willingness to use, willingness to pay for emerging transportation technologies through a survey-based framework, the Likert scale is widely accepted in the literature [1][2][3][4] . To that end, a 4-point Likert scale was adopted in this survey. A summary of the questions and the used scales are presented in Table 1 . Original research based on this dataset include: [5][6][7][8][9][10] .

Ethics Statements
Prior to the survey, informed consent was obtained from all respondents, and they were also notified that their participation in the survey is voluntary, they are free to pause or leave the survey at any point. The respondents were also ensured that their responses would be completely anonymous.

Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.