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!

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.