Should companies have a wider purpose?

Professor Alex Edmans has written extensively on why capitalism is the best way to grow the pie for everyone, but how companies can only succeed with a wider social purpose.

The tensions between public and private are a constant feature of transport and in today's discussion we explore the role of wider corporate purpose in improving outcomes.

After - finally - discovering what the Williams Shapps Plan for Rail actually said, I got together with Sir Michael Holden to discuss it.

After all, who better to pick it apart than someone who’s actually run trains for the Government.

Michael Holden has first-hand experience of the strengths and weaknesses of both public and private sector, having twice been the Government’s go-to guy for bringing trains into the public sector when private sector franchisees collapsed.

We talk through the strengths and weaknesses of Williams.

Join us for a wide-ranging discussion of the potential and pitfalls of the biggest change to the railways for 30 years.

Professor Kate Jeffery is a global leader in the neuroscience of navigation. By monitoring the brains of rats as they move about a box, she can start to figure out how our brains learn where we are - and how we create a mental map of the world.

In this discussion, we talk about how the brain works, the different parts of the brain used for navigation, why some of us navigate completely differently to others - and why all tube stations should have compass points underground.

Kate Jeffery is Professor of Behavioural Neuroscience at University College London.

Giles Fearnley has founded two successful independent transport businesses and ended his career running the country’s biggest bus group.

What has he learned from Blazefield, Prism and First? Are the things that drive growth the same as those that create a shareholder return? Is there a future for the big bus groups? Do we have a problem with short-termism?

Giles looks back at his career to try to answer some of these questions - ending with a clarion cry on the importance of localism.

My guest this week has focused on transport for a decade. She was Shadow Rail Minister under Ed Miliband, Shadow Transport Secretary under Jeremy Corbyn and chaired the Transport Select Committee until the last election.

We talk about what it’s like doing these different roles in politics, the key messages she’s heard on the select committee and the importance of long-term funding settlements in transport.

Not many MPs make a specialism of transport at a senior level: Lilian Greenwood is one of them.

Roc Sandford is a Catalyser for the environmental direct action group Extinction Rebellion.

Living off-grid on an otherwise uninhabited Hebridean island, he spends time in London either taking direct action himself or pressing Extinction Rebellion’s case. In this episode, we talk about what ER want, get under the skin of how they work as an organisation and also dive into the thorny question of whether ER is right to target public transport during their protests.

After all, a lot of people in the world of public transport felt that targeting the tube or DLR somewhat missed the mark of where the problem is.

Public transport is a solution not a problem in the environmental debate, so it’s fascinating to hear how these questions are thought about by such a high-profile activist group.

My guest this week is attempting to turn round a supertanker of a culture.

Few places are more synonymous with car travel than IKEA. Yet the giant of blue boxes has committed itself to achieve not just carbon neutrality, but carbon negative - and all in the next ten years.

Angela joins me on The Freewheeling Podcast to talk about what sustainable mobility means in an IKEA context, what needs to change and how to take people with you.

James Palmer has a vision for Cambridgeshire in which people travel under the city in autonomous pods.

It sounds crazy, but when you talk to him, you hear just how it seems to make sense.

As Mayor of the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority, he explains how he’s dealing with a fast-growing city, low population density and houses in the wrong place.

We talk about Cambridge Autonomous Metro, funding it through farmland and the role of Mayors in the modern world.

My guest this week has been specialising in recruitment in transport for over a decade.

She spends her time having conversations with key people in the sector, so understands who they are and what makes them tick.

On The Freewheeling Podcast we discuss what the industry is thinking right now, and whether there is a ‘transport type’.

Rory Sutherland is a global leader in Behavioural Science. As Vice President of Ogilvy, Rory’s mission is to educate the world on how people think.

He is passionate about explaining that people are not rational - we make decisions based on how things make us feel and we justify our feelings later with ‘rational’ arguments.

If transport companies realised this, it would change the way they plan everything.

In a conversation rich in anecdote and example, Rory gives the transport industry the benefit of decades of accumulated wisdom in the science of thinking.