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.

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.

How do we take the public with us?

Actually, is that the right question? Surely, we should be asking what the public want? And what the public doesn’t yet know it wants.

Our traditional models of consultation and engagement increasingly don’t work. They result in fearful officers bombarded with feedback from a hyper-engaged minority, while the typical resident is unaware that engagement is even taking place.

Is there a better way?

Yes! Jasmine Palardy works with local authorities to engage residents on highways schemes in a totally different way.

Why shouldn’t a local authority highways consultation involve a chicken dinner?

This year, Denmark will replace all its public transport ticketing systems with a new fully pay-as-you-go digital app.

Customers will get a transformationally better service; operators get a cost saving. What’s not to like?

This is all being delivered by the “Rejsekort & Rejseplan”, a dedicated organisation devoted to transport ticketing and information.

It is run by Tina Christensen, who tells me all about the culture change necessary to deliver this digital transformation.

It’s an inspirational story for any country further behind on digital ticketing (which is almost all of them).

This edition looks back at the themes that emerged from the 2025 episodes of The Freewheeling Podcast.

We look back at inspirational city leaders who have transformed places for the benefit of their residents (and faced death threats for doing so), we revisit the entrepreneurs building great transport products to improve journeys and we discuss the big ideas that came out of last year’s conversations.

I hope you enjoy this retrospective - there’s also a preview of the next season at the end.

Thank you so much for listening in 2025 - and, above all, Merry Christmas!