The Freewheeling Podcast

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!

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.

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.