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.

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.

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.