The Freewheeling Podcast

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 rural transport across the UK, how the Swiss have got it so right and the way I’m hoping we can learn from them.If you want to hear more from YIMBYPod, you can find it right here.

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 the Treasury’s unique character.

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 there’s so much more.All this is happening in a region with multiple county and district authorities, various bus operators and - currently - a mix of different rail operators.Somehow all this has to be stitched together into a coherent public and active travel proposition that ensures the economic potential can be delivered.The person in charge of bringing it all together is my guest this week, the Managing Director of England’s Economic Heartland: the sub-national transport body responsible for the OxCam Corridor.She joins me today to describe the nature of the challenge - and scale of the opportunity.

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 the conference floor. I’ll be dripfeeding these Interchats out over the course of the next year in addition to the regular podcast episodes.And it wasn’t just me in The Freewheeling Podcast studio, I was also joined by my Freewheeling colleague Katie-Lee English, who also recorded Interchats of her own.So here’s her first Freewheeling interview… with me!

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 culture of operators getting in a room (with coffee) to thrash out compromises that last.He finishes off by telling me that the ultimate secret is a population and politicians who actually want it.

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 and it turned out to be rich soil, if you’ll pardon the pun.In today’s episode, you’ll learn what “substrate” means and why nurturing it is critical to landing innovation in your organisation.

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, so we finish off with a chat about the status of Mobility-as-a-Service (Maas), now we’re past the peak of the hype cycle.

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 taking place. Is there a better way? Yes! Jasmine Palardy works with local authorities to engage residents on highways schemes in a totally different way.Why shouldn’t a local authority highways consultation involve a chicken dinner?

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 tells me all about the culture change necessary to deliver this digital transformation. It’s an inspirational story for any country further behind on digital ticketing (which is almost all of them).

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 happens when two 12-year-old best friends from rural Ireland (one playing with computers, one playing with buses) team up in later life, now’s your chance to find out.

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 Transport at Oxera Andy Meaney to discuss this question.

This edition looks back at the themes that emerged from the 2025 episodes of The Freewheeling Podcast.We look back at inspirational city leaders who have transformed places for the benefit of their residents (and faced death threats for doing so), we revisit the entrepreneurs building great transport products to improve journeys and we discuss the big ideas that came out of last year’s conversations.I hope you enjoy this retrospective - there’s also a preview of the next season at the end.Thank you so much for listening in 2025 - and, above all, Merry Christmas!

Data City Founder Tom Forth has been told some extraordinary reasons why the North underperforms the South.Including that it’s down to Northerners being stupid. Or drunk. He’s even read academic papers outlining these theories.In a fascinating episode of the podcast, we get into a discussion on the real reasons. They go back a thousand years but transport and our hyper-centralised way of making decisions are right at the heart of it.I really hope you enjoy listening to this conversation as much as I enjoyed having it.

Jane Cole is MD of the best bus company in Britain, at least according to the judges of the UK Bus Awards. In fact, that’s not all: she also leads the best tram company in Britain, according to the judges who awarded them Tram Operator of the Year.Today’s podcast is all about change, but it’s not primarily the sexy kind of technological change that we often think of when we think about change.It’s about culture, community and people - but it’s the stuff that makes the difference between success and failure in the transport sector.Jane describes the changes she’s made happen in Blackpool Transport and how empowerment, community focus and investment have transformed the transport service in one of the most deprived towns in Europe.

Caroline Seton is the co-founder of the London bike share firm Forest.They’re in unambiguous second place to Lime, the great global bicycle behemoth - but, famously, being second makes a firm try harder.In today’s episode, we talk about the challenges of being a shared mobility firm in a municipal environment, the realities of whether cities actually want sustainable transport and the changes she would make to transport policy.Above all - more bike parking and less car parking please!

The Budget has finally been unveiled.But what does it mean for transport?In this week’s episode, I review the budget with Sir Michael Holden, former Chairman of Directly Operated Railways.We discuss the impact on railway economics (and whether there’s money for the fares freeze), whether the fuel duty increases will actually happen, the Government’s commitment to capital investment and - above all - the need for an overarching strategy.

The world’s moving faster than ever, and policy changes with dizzying pace.It was only in 2021 that the Conservatives issued the most pro-bus policy document probably ever published by a British Government.The National Bus Strategy was something of a marvel for those of us who want to see better public transport.It promised a vision of bus lanes in every town, coordinated networks and exceptional quality - all backed up by billions of pounds of new investment.Today, Leon Daniels and I look back in time to publication day and review how it’s gone since then.

Why does electrification in the UK cost so much more than in the rest of Europe?And why does it always seem to go wrong?In today’s episode, I talk to Managing Director (UK) of Furrer+Frey, the leading Swiss engineering company.We delve into the root cause of the problem: the way HM Treasury makes funding decisions, which results in a feast-famine environment in which teams are trained, mobilised, demobilised and the skills lost. Repeatedly.We also discuss whether it’s going to get any better…

𝗙𝗶𝗹𝗶𝗽 𝗪𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗲𝘂𝘄 𝗶𝘀 𝘀𝗲𝗻𝗶𝗼𝗿 𝗱𝗲𝗽𝘂𝘁𝘆 𝗺𝗮𝘆𝗼𝗿 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗚𝗵𝗲𝗻𝘁, and the Alderman responsible for transport and mobility policy.He took over the portfolio and immediately set about trying to make Ghent a more beautiful, peaceful city.As I can confirm from having visited, he really succeeded! But not without a lot of difficulty, even including death threats.Today’s episode is a masterclass in the art of transport changemaking: the focus on experimentation, clear strategy and the need for urgency. He also highlights the power of storytelling, the limitations of data and highlights that, despite the death threats, the Circulation Plan helped him increase his majority at the next election.Come with me to Belgium and see just what a motivated, inspiring transport changemaker can do.