The Freewheeling Podcast

Some of my favourite conversations are those that bring in the perspective of someone from outside our sector and todays is a great example. Adam Scott designs experiences for multiple sectors globally. How are we doing in transport? Where are we on his mental ranking? What do we need to learn? What are we already good at? Spoiler alert - he doesn't feel we're at the absolute top of the league tab...

𝗞𝗮𝘁𝘆 𝗧𝗮𝘆𝗹𝗼𝗿, 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗘𝗢 𝗼𝗳 𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗿𝘆 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿 𝗪𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸, has worked in three different transport modes, but always for a private firm. In today’s episode, she gives a powerful defence of the role and value of the private sector in transport. She also describes what customer-focused leadership looks like and emphasises the importance of empowerment. Katy is clear, articulate and passionate about both the...

What’s it like running the biggest integrated transport authority in the world when there’s not enough money around? In today’s Interchat with Transport for London Commissioner Andy Lord, we discuss TfL’s role in economic growth and job creation - and the huge challenge of an ageing asset base. Financial sustainability is hard for any organisation but when you need to keep fares low for social pur...

Michael Hill used to be a civil servant but now works on policy for the campaign group Britain Remade. In that role, he’s trying to push through policy changes to get Britain building. In today’s episode, we talk through the extraordinary degree of political centralisation in the UK and why this is a direct contributor to making it so hard to build new tram lines in the UK. He gives the current Go...

My guest this week is a transport changemaker attempting to achieve change in the most populous country on earth. Ruchita Bansal is a transport and urban planner by background, and is now founder of SheCity. Her research reveals the extra costs imposed on women by the transport choices of Indian leaders, and the wider impact this has on society and the Indian economy. In today’s episode, she bring...

Jonathan Bray was Director of the Urban Transport Group and has spent the last year visiting suburbs all round Europe. He’s just published his findings, and it makes for a fascinating discussion. He’s clear that there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to making sustainable transport work in suburbs. Instead, it’s all about the questions cities ask and the people they invite into the room when the...

How can we stop people playing their TikToks out loud? You can’t say we don’t address the big policy questions on this podcast! Nevertheless, it’s an issue that really gets to people. So I’m joined by behavioural science expert Christian Hunt, founder of Human Risk, to figure out what we can do about it…

During the pandemic, Anna Filby was a young transport professional struggling to connect with other young transport professionals. So she created the Young Mobility Network. Roll forward six years, it’s been such a success that it’s now her full-time job. She joins me to discuss the challenges facing young people in our sector, what’s changed since I was starting out in my career and what it was l...

John Sills is an expert in Customer Experience. He’s written a book and runs The Foundation, a leading Customer Experience consultancy. He’s worked in transport just enough to understand our world, but not enough not to be able to look in as an outsider. Today’s episode is all about what an organisation needs to do to deliver an outstanding customer experience. We talk quite a lot about LNER (as y...

Last month, I hosted a special webinar for Transport Focus on Customer Experience in GBR. Specifically, what will it look like if GBR is a customer experience disaster - and how do we stop that happening? The specific goal was to avoid that happening by having the difficult conversations we need to have now, so we don’t need to have them then. As I was hosting it, I thought my Freewheeling Podcast...

There aren’t many people who’ve personally made a Metro happen. Big infrastructure products normally start with a regional or national Government drawing lines on a map. The South Wales Metro started with Mark Barry coming back from Milan and saying “we should have one of those” - and then refusing to shut up about it. Today’s episode is a fascinating account of how to make transport change happen...

It’s said that “success has many fathers but failure is an orphan”. Well, given the sucess of the Bee Network, Anne Marie Purcell has a very strong claim to parentage. She was Chief Transformation Officer at Transport for Greater Manchester throughout the period the Bee Network was mobilised. In this episode, we talk about the Bee Network (of course we do!) but we also talk about the templates for...

How on earth do you lead an organisation of 20,000 people with 16 transport modes and a £7 billion budget? Through people! That’s the clear answer of Claire Mann, Chief Operating Officer of Transport for London. In this highly personal episode, she unpacks her personal leadership style and why it is so effective. In the process, she explains why authenticity is so important, how she plans her work...

Do you listen to the YIMBYPod with James O’Malley? Well, if you do, I’ve got some alarming news for you - next week, you’ll be hearing me. James O’Malley asked me to come and tell him about Mini Switzerland , the national demonstrator of Swiss-style transport integration I’m trying to will into being in the Hope Valley. Take a listen for why I believe Mini Switzerland is so key to the future of ru...

I bet, like me, you constantly hear references to what the Treasury thinks. “The Treasury” sometimes seems to be a person in its own right, with its own opinions and culture. How did the Treasury form its culture? How does the Treasury work? How does the Treasury think? My guest this week, Katie-Lee English, spent a year working in the Treasury and talks to me about the things that have created th...

Naomi Green has one of the toughest, and most exciting, jobs in transport today. The Oxford-Cambridge Corridor is a change programme on an extraordinary scale hidden in plain site. Both Oxford and Cambridge are expanding, driven by new Growth Companies. At least one - and possibly multiple - brand new towns are planned. The largest theme park in Europe is coming. A new railway is opening. And ther...

I’ve spent the last couple of days at the fantastic Interchange conference in Manchester. If you weren’t there, my job is to give you FOMO for the next year so you turn up next time. The good folk at Interchange even built me a recording studio, so I was able to spend my time having what we’re calling Interchats , 15-minute short interviews with key transport changemakers as they passed through th...

I’m joined by Brian O’Rourke, CEO and co-founder of CitySwift, to explore one of the only AI companies I can think of to literally start in a bus garage. We talk about joining messy, siloed data to improve reliability and efficiency, why “black box” tools fail schedulers, what COVID changed and what it’s like attempting to scale technology into a sector like transport. If you want to know what hap...

So many people have asked me how the Swiss achieve their extraordinary level of transport integration. Helmut Eichhorn runs the SwissPass Alliance, the industry body that makes Swiss public transport feel effortless. We talk through the machinery of integration: a federal legal duty to offer one ticket, shared back-end platforms for fares and information, standards with a few exceptions and a cult...

Johannah Randall has spent a lifetime working with stations. She led the redevelopment of Kings Cross for GNER, has worked on station planning for both HS2 and the HS2 operator and advised on station design for entirely new railways like Saudi Arabia’s Etihad Rail. Yet she’s not happy with our direction of travel on stations, if you’ll pardon the pun. She joins me to describe her concerns.

Tom Geraghty is now an expert in psychological safety at work, but he started out as an ecologist. A career focusing on how organisations actually work combined with his knowledge of ecosystems to make him realise something very important: organisations are ecosystems. So he started thinking about what it would mean to consider organisational change through the prism of stewardship of an ecosystem...

The transport sector has long operated in an environment in which it was assumed that competition was the guarantor of service quality and low prices. Those assumptions are changing, with local authorities taking control of bus services and the rail network being nationalised. Does the competition law framework still work for this new environment? I get together with economist and Head of Transpor...

Sandra Witzel is comparatively unusual. Millions of people in Britain are disabled, while hundreds of thousands work in transport. But there isn’t as much overlap, especially at a senior level. So today’s discussion is all about Sandra’s perspectives on how transport needs to change to avoid disabling people, and about the sector’s willingness to make those changes. Sandra’s day job is at Skedgo,...

How do we take the public with us? Actually, is that the right question? Surely, we should be asking what the public want? And what the public doesn’t yet know it wants. Our traditional models of consultation and engagement increasingly don’t work. They result in fearful officers bombarded with feedback from a hyper-engaged minority, while the typical resident is unaware that engagement is even ta...

This year, Denmark will replace all its public transport ticketing systems with a new fully pay-as-you-go digital app. Customers will get a transformationally better service; operators get a cost saving. What’s not to like? This is all being delivered by the “Rejsekort & Rejseplan”, a dedicated organisation devoted to transport ticketing and information. It is run by Tina Christensen , who tel...