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.

How much of the Bee Network's success is franchising, and how much is just money?

In today's Interchat with Vernon Everett, Transport Commissioner for Greater Manchester and chair of Transport for Wales, we get his answer, along with the numbers behind it: reliability up from 65% to over 80%, ridership up 30% in the first franchised area, and eight commuter rail lines joining the network from the end of 2026.

Vernon is candid that franchising is probably not for everybody. But if you want genuine integration across every mode, he argues, you cannot do it without control of the buses and the fare revenue.

This is the first Interchat recorded by Katie English, my Freewheeling associate.

Interchats are a series of short conversations recorded on the conference floor at Interchange 26 in Manchester.

What has to change inside government before anything changes on the street?

In today's Interchat with Ben Plowden, Chief Executive of Campaign for Better Transport, we discuss the machinery of government, why combined authorities should never be treated as a single category and the local transport authorities now spending 70% of their budgets on social care.

We also discuss my own despair about the climate crisis - and Ben's rather more useful answer to it.

Interchats are a series of short conversations recorded on the conference floor at Interchange 26 in Manchester.

David Skaith, the Mayor of York and North Yorkshire, joins me to discuss the transformative impact of devolution on local governance.

He emphasises the critical role of transport in enabling economic growth, health, and skills of a region with distinct challenges.

In our conversation, Skaith highlights the need for significant investment in bus services and active travel, noting a 50% decline in bus miles over 10 years.

I always enjoy talking to this generation of Mayors, as - far more than central Government - they understand that transport is not a ‘thing’ on its own: it is an essential enabler of a healthy, prosperous society.

This Interchat is a great example.

Interchats are a series of short conversations recorded on the conference floor at Interchange 26 in Manchester.

What is lost when the government sells its own brain?

In today's Interchat with TRL CEO Paul Campion, we discuss the privatisation of Britain's transport research laboratory and what is about to happen when autonomous vehicles arrive on London's streets.

Paul is generous about the gains from privatisation: agility, commercial discipline and the freedom to change. What went was the peer relationship with the DfT, because public sector procurement is a search for a predefined answer rather than a search for a better question.

We also discuss his real worry about autonomy, which is not that the vehicles will crash but the risks of zero-occupancy vehicles.

Interchats are a series of short conversations recorded on the conference floor at Interchange 26 in Manchester.

Some of my favourite conversations are those that bring in the perspective of someone from outside our sector and todays is a great example.

Adam Scott designs experiences for multiple sectors globally. How are we doing in transport? Where are we on his mental ranking? What do we need to learn? What are we already good at?

Spoiler alert - he doesn't feel we're at the absolute top of the league table for experience design, but the great thing is that gives us an awful lot of potential to improve!

Interchats are a series of short conversations recorded on the conference floor at Interchange 26 in Manchester.