Imagine being able to live 90 miles from a town and commuting in 30 minutes regadless of peak hours.
As for the noise, if it can land vertically, I can immagine it making a steep descent on top of a tall building, unloading passengers and then autonomously taking off to pick somone else some other place.
Nope - NYC used to have a lot of air taxi traffic and after the horrendous accident on the helipad on the top of Pan Am building all air traffic was banned inside the city. Helipads are only allowed along the river. I imagine other cities would impose similar restrictions.
There will still be traffic if everyone is heading in to the same few spots. There's only so many spots these things will be able to land, not to mention they will need to maintain a certain amount of separation from other air traffic.
Trains that go 180 mph have a way of draining your pocketbook. If you don't work near a station, or live near one (or, worse, both) you face commuting hassles. You may have to take a train that averages 30 mph as it makes all stops to get to the 180 mph express one.
It actually works well enough in japan: 15-20 minutes on a local to get to the Shinkansen station, then an hour on that, then another 15-20 minutes to get where you are going. Not really in daily commute range, but definitely viable weekly.
It won't be 30 minutes. It'd be a few hours. First because they said it could go faster than 150kph, which means it tops out at roughly 90 miles an hour. Second, the range of the thing is about 60 miles, so you'd have to charge it partway.
Swapping batteries is a no brainier for this tech. There is zero reason to have a 500k aircraft waiting around charging vs having 2+ set's of batteries.
Electric cars have a long enough range and are mostly single family so swapping is less useful.
Reserve is a much larger issue, aircraft want to keep ~1hour of reserve these things are starting with less than that.
As for the noise, if it can land vertically, I can immagine it making a steep descent on top of a tall building, unloading passengers and then autonomously taking off to pick somone else some other place.