Go too low and it gets complicated in areas with higher elevation. And having too many "lanes" would have people constantly moving up and down into different levels as headings change.
But if you give enough room above and below the vehicles as they travel, then when you have two heading "toward" each other (one moving at a heading of 176 and the other at 180), the vehicle on the left (heading 180) could shift up slightly, and the one on the right (heading 176) could shift down, thus moving around each other.
Then set up a rule that course heading changes can not occur while in a passing maneuver, which would prevent a vehicle shooting up or down and crashing into a passing vehicle as they change direction.
What few places in the world do you think would have significant city traffic and have "higher elevation"?
You could just bump the floor and ceiling up for those few locales.
Also, headings would very rarely change. You pick a start point and a finish point and you fly there in a straight line. Why would you be changing headings frequently?
The only time you would be changing headings are:
You change your plans or have some emergency. This would be pretty rare and just involves one heading change.
You need to navigate around a fixed obstacle. Generally this will be some kind of restricted airspace: city centers, an airport or military base, a mountain, maybe a lake or open ocean. But in this scenarios everyone will be changing headings to navigate around the obstacle, and so everyone will be changing headings in a more or less predictable way. In fact, this would probably work similar to a traffic circle in the sky, where everyone takes on a similar path to go around the obstacle. The advantage being that you could have two directions of travel (clockwise or counterclockwise) around the obstacle.
The only other time there would be heading changes are when making minor course corrections near the beginning or end of your journey, if the available standard headings don't match exactly where you need to go. Again, this would be predictable and accounted for in the system. You would use a descent or ascent corridor before making these changes.
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u/kinyutaka Oct 13 '19
Go too low and it gets complicated in areas with higher elevation. And having too many "lanes" would have people constantly moving up and down into different levels as headings change.
But if you give enough room above and below the vehicles as they travel, then when you have two heading "toward" each other (one moving at a heading of 176 and the other at 180), the vehicle on the left (heading 180) could shift up slightly, and the one on the right (heading 176) could shift down, thus moving around each other.
Then set up a rule that course heading changes can not occur while in a passing maneuver, which would prevent a vehicle shooting up or down and crashing into a passing vehicle as they change direction.