Jonathan Bray was Director of the Urban Transport Group and has spent the last year visiting suburbs all round Europe. He’s just published his findings, and it makes for a fascinating discussion. He’s clear that there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to making sustainable transport work in suburbs. Instead, it’s all about the questions cities ask and the people they invite into the room when the decisions are taken. In today’s episode, he takes me on a tour of different examples of best practice in Europe but focuses primarily on getting the questions right.

How can we stop people playing their TikToks out loud? You can’t say we don’t address the big policy questions on this podcast! Nevertheless, it’s an issue that really gets to people. So I’m joined by behavioural science expert Christian Hunt, founder of Human Risk, to figure out what we can do about it…

During the pandemic, Anna Filby was a young transport professional struggling to connect with other young transport professionals. So she created the Young Mobility Network. Roll forward six years, it’s been such a success that it’s now her full-time job. She joins me to discuss the challenges facing young people in our sector, what’s changed since I was starting out in my career and what it was like creating the YMN while holding down a full time job. We’re also joined by Alessandro Zenati, who runs the London Hub of the Young Mobility Network as a volunteer.

John Sills is an expert in Customer Experience. He’s written a book and runs The Foundation, a leading Customer Experience consultancy. He’s worked in transport just enough to understand our world, but not enough not to be able to look in as an outsider. Today’s episode is all about what an organisation needs to do to deliver an outstanding customer experience. We talk quite a lot about LNER (as you’d expect!) and get into the detail of what it means for leadership and management. With GBR coming into existence in the next few years, there isn’t a better time to be having this conversation.

Last month, I hosted a special webinar for Transport Focus on Customer Experience in GBR. Specifically, what will it look like if GBR is a customer experience disaster - and how do we stop that happening? The specific goal was to avoid that happening by having the difficult conversations we need to have now, so we don’t need to have them then. As I was hosting it, I thought my Freewheeling Podcast listeners would love it, so here it is. I start with an interview with Linda Moir, who led customer experience at both Virgin Atlantic and London 2012. Then we have a really crunchy panel discussion with Vernon Everitt (now Commissioner of Transport for Greater Manchester) about his time at TfL, Nick Haller (who looks after Customer Experience for Europe’s best railway, Swiss Federal Railways SBB), Marie Daly (who’s already leading an integrated public sector railway at Transport for Wales), Jacqueline Starr (the rail industry’s longtime customer champion at Rail Delivery Group) and Natasha Grice (director of Transport Focus). It’s a really insightful conversation, which I wholeheartedly recommend!

There aren’t many people who’ve personally made a Metro happen. Big infrastructure products normally start with a regional or national Government drawing lines on a map. The South Wales Metro started with Mark Barry coming back from Milan and saying “we should have one of those” - and then refusing to shut up about it. Today’s episode is a fascinating account of how to make transport change happen in the real world, with powerful lessons for anyone whose role is transport change - or who just wants transport change. This is one of those episodes I particularly hope you’ll listen to.

It’s said that “success has many fathers but failure is an orphan”. Well, given the sucess of the Bee Network, Anne Marie Purcell has a very strong claim to parentage. She was Chief Transformation Officer at Transport for Greater Manchester throughout the period the Bee Network was mobilised. In this episode, we talk about the Bee Network (of course we do!) but we also talk about the templates for succesful change across all organisations. The Bee Network was Anne Marie’s first role in transport: she’s a change person first, and a transport person second. That makes for a fascinating conversation.

How on earth do you lead an organisation of 20,000 people with 16 transport modes and a £7 billion budget? Through people! That’s the clear answer of Claire Mann, Chief Operating Officer of Transport for London. In this highly personal episode, she unpacks her personal leadership style and why it is so effective. In the process, she explains why authenticity is so important, how she plans her work and describes her passion for public transport. Highly recommended! (Apologies for the sound quality in this episode; for various reasons we had to do it by phone).

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.