Good Day my Good Friend.
Some weeks I just want to get straight to the point when it comes to intros. This is one of those weeks. Let’s get to it.
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☠️ Death by Trial
In a hospital in a major city, a registered donor sadly passes on an operating table. The time will come for their family to grieve their passing, and for friends to pay their respects. No doubt beautiful words will be said about their kindness at their funeral. In the meantime, on a hospital on the other side of the city, another person entirely - likely completely unknown to the donor - waits patiently in another hospital for a viable heart to be available. They have been waiting for months, and today, another family’s misfortune is about to become the day that their family have been waiting months for.
From the moment of passing, the clock ticks. A healthy heart has about 4 hours of viability post death, a time period that could be extended to 8 hours if it is immediately placed in cold storage. But doing this has its own risks. The cooling procedure itself, when the temperature of the heart is reduced to around 4C, can damage the heart. Once you place it in cold storage, you cannot take it out again until its with the recipient, meaning you cannot monitor its condition in the meantime. It is imperative that the heart gets to the patient within 4 hours.
There are three options to get this heart from one side of the city to the other. The first option is the NHS Blood and Transplant Service, which provides most of the transplant logistics services across the NHS. But this is time critical, so a van being stuck in traffic won’t do the trick. An ambulance, with its sirens screaming, can clear a path through the city. But as anyone who has experienced rush hour knows, even ambulances with their blues-and-twos blazing can get held up. The final option is by helicopter. The local air ambulance can provide this service, but may be out dealing another emergency. Plus, transporting by helicopter is expensive. Each air ambulance mission costs about £3000 - well worth the price for the recipient and their family, but a price that needs paying regardless.
There is another way to deliver time-critical cargo such as a heart: by drone. If you believed the headlines from five years ago, our skies should be buzzing by now. We were promised a revolution in urban logistics—a near-future where electric drones would silently whisk urgent medical supplies between hospitals, deliver parts to engineers on construction sites, and perhaps even drop off the occasional grocery order, all while reducing road congestion and carbon emissions.
The technology to do this exists. The demand, particularly for medical and emergency deliveries, is real. The discrepancy between the potential of drone delivery and its operational reality is no longer a question of engineering. We have solved the battery density problems. There are on-board sensors that detect and avoid other air traffic. We have quiet rotors.
What we do not have is a regulatory framework that allows these machines to fly. We are like a bird that has allowed its fledglings to take their practice flights, but is stopping them from leaving the nest.
Over the last few years, the UK and Europe have excelled at one thing: the Regulatory Sandbox. Governments have poured millions into programmes like the UK’s Future Flight Challenge or the EU’s AMU-LED demonstrations. These initiatives produce fantastic press releases. They show drones delivering defibrillators in controlled environments or ferrying mail between remote islands. However, a 2026 evaluation by the Policy Institute at King’s College London highlights a critical failure: what they call the "Sandbox Trap."
The idea of a Regulatory Sandbox is to provide a safe, secure environment that is rigorously controlled for the purpose of testing. For Government’s they are perfect. They allow them to test new ideas and concepts, as well as new regulatory frameworks, without doing anything that might be seen as controversial or seen as dangerous. The problem is then scaling those changes to the wider world.
For example, lets say a Regulatory Sandbox allows you to deliver ten drone deliveries in one neighbourhood well away from conflicting air traffic. But for the service to be commercially viable, it needs to deliver a thousand deliveries across a city. Would the rules in the sandbox look the same as that needed by the commercial reality? Newsflash: its very unlikely.
In the context of the UK, this means shifting from a regulated airspace where risks are managed, to a tightly regulated airspace which demands zero risk. The Rules of Air Regulations 2015 provide the basic legal framework for testing drones at low altitudes. But outside of the test environment, the same basic legal framework applies to drones as it does to a commercial airliner or someone flying a Cessna for fun.
For drone delivery, the practical implication is this. Drones have to meet a safety standard that is, for all intents and purposes, zero risk. Whereas delivery drivers and paramedics in the cab of an ambulance just have to manage their risks. So the higher risk and less reliable form of transport gets locked in.
In Europe and the UK, the mechanism for approving drone operations is known as SORA (Specific Operations Risk Assessment). On paper, SORA is a triumph of logic. It categorises flights based on risk (ground risk to people, air risk to other planes) and assigns a "safety score" that dictates what safety systems you need. In practice, however, SORA has become a suffocating administrative burden.
Recent industry feedback from late 2025 suggests that SORA has evolved from a safety methodology into a market gatekeeper. The requirements for urban operations is so high that the cost of compliance is astronomical. Operators are required to provide cold, hard data on population densities and ground risks that often simply doesn't exist in the format regulators demand.
This creates a paradox:
You need flight data to prove your operation is safe and to satisfy SORA requirements.
You cannot get permission to fly to generate that data because you haven't yet satisfied the SORA requirements.
This paradox crushes the ability of smaller, innovative companies to get established. Unless you have an experienced legal team on hand (and most startups don’t), the compliance paperwork takes 4 to 8 months to process for a single operational approval.
At the heart of all this is achieving the drone equivalent of a holy grail, but one that could be tackled with the stroke of a pen: Beyond Visual Line of Sight, or BVLOS.
Under current rules, the pilot of the drone has to be within visual line of sight of it. You cannot have one pilot per drone for a 10-mile delivery. You need one operator monitoring 10 or 20 drones autonomously. Without that, the economics of the operation don’t exist. Imagine if every Amazon or Evri delivery driver had to have someone sitting in the passenger seat. The whole operation would collapse under its own weight, and no more free delivery.
Technically, drones are ready for this. They use 5G, satellite links, and onboard AI to navigate. Yet, as of 2026, routine BVLOS permissions in non-segregated airspace are as rare as hen's teeth. The primary sticking point is Electronic Conspicuity (EC).
You may not be aware, but not everything in the air has to transmit its position. While Flightradar may show a congested skies over the UK, it does not show the position of many, many more aircraft that do not have an electronic transponder. Gliders, paragliders, and even some military aircraft do not show up on the radar screen. This is dealt with through some restrictions on airspace (e.g. don’t fly your glider across the approach to a major airport) and relying on the good will and common sense of pilots.
For drones, this is not the case. This means that the drone has to “see” non-transmitting aircraft, and take actions to avoid accordingly. This is technically feasible, but is orders of magnitude more difficult than having every object in the sky be required to transmit its position. This need not even require fitting a transponder to every aircraft. There are, quite literally, apps that give most of the functionality of a flight computer on your mobile.
The frustration here is not just about commercial profits for delivery companies. It is about what our cities lose. When we block drone delivery through excessive caution, we are actively choosing:
More Vans: Every parcel not delivered by a drone is likely delivered by a van, contributing to the 30% of urban congestion caused by logistics. Even a small dent in this market helps in a congested urban area.
Slower Healthcare: We are denying the NHS and emergency services the ability to move pathology samples, blood, and hearts between hospitals in 15 minutes instead of an hour.
Carbon Emissions: We are delaying the decarbonisation of the "last mile."
Cities should have the option to integrate this layer of transport. Of course, there will always be restrictions. No one expects drones to buzz around Heathrow or swarm over sensitive government buildings. Privacy and noise concerns are valid and must be managed through zoning and strict time of day rules. But there is a vast difference between regulated operations and the current state of effective prohibition.
To unlock the benefits of this technology, we need a fundamental shift in regulatory philosophy:
1. Accept Equivalent Safety, Not Perfect Safety. We accept that road transport carries risk, even if we trying our hardest to manage it downwards. We accept that pilots and a computer in charge of a fully-loaded Airbus A320 carries some risk. Drones should be held to a high standard, but not an impossible one. If a drone delivery network creates a statistical risk that is lower than the fleet of vans it replaces, that should be viewed as a net safety gain.
2. Modernise the airspace. We need to accelerate the deployment of automated air traffic control for drones. This digital infrastructure allows drones to file flight plans and avoid each other automatically. But it only works if all airspace users participate. The days of silent flying in busy airspace must end.
3. Automate the Approval Process We cannot run a 21st-century industry with a 20th-century rubber-stamp bureaucracy. The SORA process needs to be digitised and streamlined. If an operator has proven their safety case in one city, they shouldn't have to start from zero in the next. This means passporting of approvals across regions.
4. Create Permanent Drone Corridors Instead of temporary sandboxes, cities need permanent drone highways —designated corridors where BVLOS flight is pre-approved. This allows businesses to invest in infrastructure with confidence. We have had the concept of air corridors nailed down since the 1950s. Its time to expand this into the city.
By failing to update our regulatory frameworks, we are stifling innovation and denying our cities a cleaner, faster, and more efficient future. The technology is ready. The question is: are the regulators?
A final thought from me, and that is on perception. There is a reason I painted a picture of transporting a heart across a city. Too much of our urban logistics discussion focuses on parcels, because its the most obvious. Maybe it extends to store deliveries. But amongst the millions of packages crossing the UK every day are ones that are truly a matter of life and death.
Logistics is a complex beast, and we have to think outside of simplistic assumptions. You might not like the idea of drones flying across the city dropping Amazon parcels all over the place. But that does not mean that drones cannot play an important role for time critical deliveries. What we are doing is stopping them from realising that role.
👩🎓Latest Research
The clever clogs at our universities, government departments, and other clever people have published the following excellent research. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author – they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.
TL:DR - The paper proposes an iterative, fragility-based method using a mixed-integer linear programming model to identify and reinforce the most critical parts of a railway timetable, improving its robustness against delays, and validates this approach on a real Norwegian railway case.
TL:DR - The study finds that shared electric mopeds in Fukuoka can significantly reduce travel time and distance compared to buses and trains, particularly in areas with limited public transport, but their higher costs in those low-accessibility zones may limit their contribution to transport equity without targeted policy measures such as expanded networks and fare subsidies.
TL:DR - The study segments air passengers across European countries into distinct traveller groups based on their travel behaviours and characteristics, offering insights that can support more targeted transport planning and policy decision-making in European aviation markets.
TL:DR - This systematic review synthesizes global evidence on how the COVID-19 pandemic affected transport equity by reshaping both physical and virtual accessibility, highlighting policy levers that improved or worsened equitable access to mobility services.
TL:DR - Provides a systemic analysis of smart mobility innovations in regional Japan, identifying policy triggers, technological approaches (including autonomous and integrated services), and social outcomes.
😀 Positive News
Here are some articles showing that, despite the state of the world, good stuff is still happening in sustainable transport. So get your fix of positivity here.
Transport for London published a draft Business Plan outlining how it will invest heavily in sustainable travel through expanded bus priority, electrified fleets, new trains, improved signalling, more step-free access at stations, street space reallocation, and continued expansion of cycling and walking infrastructure. The plan builds on progress like Cycleways and the zero-emission bus fleet to shape delivery over the next 5 years, signalling a substantial pipeline of projects.
A £430,000 active travel scheme launched on 5 Jan 2026 to extend footways and cycle paths along the A29 Dungannon Road, introducing about 1.1 km of new walking and cycling routes backed by multi-city support for active travel.
Plans opened for public consultation that will deliver quicker, more reliable bus journeys, upgraded walking and cycling routes, and improved accessible bus stops as part of the Bee Network’s delivery phases.
Cornwall Council’s Penzance Sustainable Travel Network continues its phased delivery of footway widening, raised crossings, tactile paving, planter installs and traffic calming on Market Jew Street and Market Place. Progress reports show work has moved forward and further walking/cycling infrastructure builds are planned in January–March 2026.
The UK government launched its first comprehensive Road Safety Strategy in nearly a decade (7 Jan 2026), setting national targets to cut serious injuries and deaths, with emphasis on education, design, and infrastructure safety, which directly ties to active travel uptake and low-carbon modal shifts.
💻 Hard Work
Much like last week, it was a week spent riding the rails and heading up and down motorways, as projects were completed and others were potentially being started.
Monday was full of in-person meetings in London, both planned and unplanned. Seeing Richard Lewis and Danny Williams after too long of not doing so was great fun, and it was a great chat about all things cycling and policy making. Then, it was like a mini-Transport Systems Catapult get together. Where I managed to bump into Alex Burrows (now working on hydrogen trains) and Andrew Everett (who led the UK’s early forays into automotive battery technology) within about 10 minutes of each other.
Tuesday was spent as is usual: transport strategising in Bradford. Wednesday was a game of two halves. In the morning, it was handover time at the Centre for Net Zero, who I helped project manage the Crowdflex demand flexibility trial. In the afternoon, I spent it with some truly brilliant people. Namely Siv Malik, Joe Reeve, Steve McAdam, Jackie Sadek, Paul Powesland, and Bertie Wneck talking Forest City. I truly felt like the least clever person in the room, and believe me when I say that is not a bad thing.
Thursday was a day off, as it was my wife Karen’s 44th 40th birthday. We spent it walking the dogs and doing a bit of shopping at Rushden Lakes. Which we found out is home to some re-introduced beavers. We did not see them, but several trees showed clear signs of being knawed at by some hungry mouths.
As for today, well, hopefully my panel session at TransportAI has gone ok, that is all I will say.
🎶 Musical Finale
We are the fortunate ones,
Who’ve never faced, oppression’s gun.
Seeing the news in recent weeks from across the pond has made these lyrics from Rebellion by Linkin Park (featuring Daron Malakian from System of a Down) hit all the more harder. My favourite song on my favourite Linkin Park album shows that while playing the rebel sounds great, and its fun to pretend you are, actual rebellion is hard to the point of dangerous. Those who do it for the right reasons need our support.