The Freewheeling Podcast

One in five Swiss journeys are made using Digital Pay-As-You-Go, a system that uses your phone location to track your journeys and automatically charge you the cheapest fare for the journeys you make.
This offers the benefits of Contactless - plus many more.
Yet in the UK, we’re obsessed with “London-style” ticketing.
In today’s podcast episode, I’m interviewed by my co-host Katie-Lee English on why it’s time to move beyond Contactless cards.

Transport finds innovation hard. It is fiendishly complex, but the. Connected Places Catapult is trying to help people navigate their way through it. In this Interchat, Erika Lewis, the Catapult’s CEO, tells me how they try to connect an incredibly challenging sector - and how her career history in complex sectors has helped her do that.
Oh, and she tells me precisely what a Catapult is as well!
Interchats are a series of short conversations recorded on the conference floor at Interchange 26 in Manchester.

Andrew Browning is the founder and CEO of Schemeflow, an AI startup. Last week, we spoke about Combined Authorities; this week it’s AI.
He created his business just weeks before the launch of ChatGPT, so has been at the heart of the AI revolution, working both in London and Silicon Valley.
We discuss the willingness of the transport sector to adopt AI, what the AI tech bros are actually like from someone who knows them personally, and whether or not AI is going to create a jobs apocalypse. Spoiler on the last point: neither of us this think it will, net - but there’ll be big change.

Andrew Browning was the first Chief of Staff to the first Mayor of the West Midlands.
As a result, he had the unique experience of being at ground zero for the creation of the regional government for Britain’s second city.
He both witnessed and influenced the creation of West Midlands Combined Authority, and is here to share what went well, what didn’t and what lessons can be learned.
Given that many more Combined Authorities are likely to be created in the next few years, this is a very timely episode of The Freewheeling Podcast.

We measure fares, frequency and reliability, so why not fear?
Jocelyn Elleby is just two years into her career and already an expert in the safety of women and girls on public transport.
In this episode, she explains why so little of what women experience is ever reported, how AI could make CCTV useful before an incident instead of after it and the limits of relying on bystanders.
We also talk about male allies, what TfL taught me and why an argument is better than silence.
This is a topic that wasn’t be talked about when I started out in my career, and I’ve learned a lot in the last decade.
If, like me, you’re a man still learning how our service is experienced by half our customers, I highly recommend listening to this episode.