The Freewheeling Podcast

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.

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.

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.