The Bee Network must take to the skies
This post is an entry for the TxP Progress Prize, an essay competition intended to identify antidotes to Britain’s malaise: ‘Britain is stuck. How can we get it moving again?’
This time 200 years ago, Robert Stephenson and his collaborators had just set up shop on Forth Street in Newcastle. Work began in earnest on the world’s first steam engine, the Locomotion No 1, which became operational in 1825. By 1830, they were ready to demonstrate the world’s first passenger train: Stephenson’s Rocket set off from Liverpool on 15th September, carrying passengers including the Prime Minister, to Manchester at speeds averaging 12mph. History was made, and the North West once again affirmed its role as laboratory of the economic future of the world.
What is Manchester’s role in the national story today? The Resolution Foundation, in their recent landmark publication ‘Ending Stagnation’ argue that “The UK’s most plausible route to raising national income and closing regional gaps is our big cities outside London succeeding: Birmingham and Greater Manchester.”
Greater Manchester remains 35 per cent less productive than London, a demonstrably larger gap than between France’s second city, Lyon, and Paris, which is stands at just 20 per cent. If productivity in both the Manchester metro area and London continues to grow at its 2004-2019 pace, it would take nearly a century (90 years) to close the productivity gap to that observed between Lyon and Paris. Determination to accelerate the city’s revival is what is needed, rather than complacency about what has been achieved to date1
Ending Stagnation is a rallying call to treat Manchester and Birmingham as talismanic engines of growth, driving the UK out of its long-running economic stupor. This will “require change on a scale not currently being contemplated.” Central to their vision is a vast expansion of Manchester’s public transport network.
Despite significant investment in the tram network in recent years, currently almost seven out of ten commutes are still made by car, and almost four in ten highly-skilled workers cannot reach the central employment district within 45 minutes. “If our second cities are to be effectively bigger with higher-performing centres there is no alternative to developing their public transport networks”
Let us now hop across to Paris, where preparations are well underway for the 2024 Olympics. If all goes to plan, select visitors will be able to experience an entirely new means of getting around: an 18-propeller eVOTL, created by German company Volocopter, is due to whisk paying passengers - in the first such trial of its kind - from Charles de Gaulle to the city centre.
eVTOL technology is rapidly approaching deployment stage. In October 2023, the Civil Aviation Administration of China awarded type certification to EHang, permitting them to fly autonomous, two-passenger aircraft. China’s Bao’an region plans to build more than 100 Vertiports by 2025. Chicago airport is set to see the first US eVTOL flights take off in 2025, with similar plans afoot in New York. Currently more than 200 eVTOL companies globally are jostling for market share in a market now valued at $11bn.
What could this technological leap-forward mean for the UK? What follows is a speculative proposal - more napkin-sketch than blueprint - for how Manchester could harness this fast-emerging technology to re-imagine its public transport system for the 21st century.
The Bee network takes to the skies
First, some principles. An eVTOL-based urban transportation system across the city-region of Manchester (let us call it the Flying Bee Network, or FBN) must first and foremost aim to slash travel times for a sizeable number of the population, particularly knowledge workers. This means it must be fast, and close to where people live and work. An aspirational goal would be to double the proportion of graduates who can commute to their offices within 30 mins (from 39% to 78%)2.
The FBN must be safe, environmentally friendly, affordable and not impinge on people’s peace and quiet. Such a scheme should be publicly owned and operated, to support the levels of infrastructure required and to ensure broad-based access.
The Model
The largest objections are likely to be safety and disturbance. eVTOLs are very quiet3, but to aid safety and reassure that the skies will not become clogged with machines, this proposal suggests that eVTOLs should only fly over the main road arteries, helping to manage flight paths and take traffic off those roads.
Within the city centre, eVTOLS would land at newly-built primary Vertiports built on top of the five existing central train stations
To impact commuting times, the FBN needs to be close to where people live. Local vertiports would be built along the main arteries, with a frequency ideally approaching bus stations. Bridging the road would allow these local vertiports to take advantage of the clear airspace above, and allow for repeatable, standardised designs.
Security checks must be avoided, and eVTOL journeys, which typically carry four people, should be point to point i.e. all passengers embark and disembark together - saving on journey times.
Worked Example
Ellie is a lawyer living in West Didsbury. Her commute to the Green Quarter, North Manchester, currently takes 49 minutes.
Her FBN journey might be:
- 10 minute walk to local vertiport
- 5 minute wait
- 12 minute flight time, to Victoria Station4
- 4 minute walk to the office
- Total: 31 minutes
Summary
It is the way of modern Britain, when faced with such proposals, to fire up the spreadsheets and aim to reduce the entire scheme to a simple measure of ‘economic gain’. Infrastructure costs vs commuting time savings; see which way the scales go. What our accountant-guardians cannot know, cannot model, are the second-order effects of large-scale transformational initiatives.
The FBN would place Manchester on the global map as a tech-forward, ambitious city, helping to attract graduates and ambitious souls from around the world. It could serve as a template for expansion of an eVTOL network right across the North, joining Liverpool to Leeds, in times faster than high-speed rail.
But most of all it would inspire hope, ambition and optimism. The economy - contrary to the mechanistic assumptions of economists - is not based ultimately on calculations but on the spirits and dreams of ordinary people. Whether it be a hairdressers expanding next door, or two students developing an algorithm, the actions that amount to growth come from a simple belief that the future will be better than the past.
While technology races ahead in the 21st century, the ordinary person in the street is liable to feel a certain disconnection from it all: green electricity is produced miles away, AI is enigmatic and solitary. Transportation still holds that most rare quality in technology: the capacity to give people a sense that they are collectively participating in something. Rocket launches, train journeys - these are shared events. A transportation system that takes to the skies is a story that the residents of Manchester, and the people of England, can be part of, can witness, and can involve themselves in.
It is this talismanic quality that we are after more than anything. Britain is short of hope, and short of self-belief. But it needn’t be: Manchester, once home to the world’s first passenger railway, and before that to Britain’s first canal, can once again be the world’s technological laboratory.
From ‘A tale of two cities (Part 2)’ by the Resolution Foundation, an in-depth look at Manchester which fed into ‘Ending Stagnation’. https://economy2030.resolutionfoundation.org/reports/a-tale-of-two-cities-part-2/
The 39% figure comes from the graph earlier in the essay (Fig 29)
Joby Aviation, a leading eVTOL company, recorded a volume of 45 decibels in acoustic testing with NASA, about the volume of a refrigerator. https://www.jobyaviation.com/news/joby-revolutionary-low-noise-footprint-nasa-testing/
State of the art eVTOls can travel at speeds of 150-200mph. For the sake of this example I have assumed they would average speeds closer to 40-50mph, given they are operating in congested urban areas