The Freewheeling Podcast

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…

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.

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.

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).

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.

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!

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.

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.

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 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!

Caroline Seton is the co-founder of the London bike share firm Forest. They’re in unambiguous second place to Lime, the great global bicycle behemoth - but, famously, being second makes a firm try harder. In today’s episode, we talk about the challenges of being a shared mobility firm in a municipal environment, the realities of whether cities actually want sustainable transport and the changes she would make to transport policy. Above all - more bike parking and less car parking please!

Data City Founder Tom Forth has been told some extraordinary reasons why the North underperforms the South. Including that it’s down to Northerners being stupid. Or drunk. He’s even read academic papers outlining these theories. In a fascinating episode of the podcast, we get into a discussion on the real reasons. They go back a thousand years but transport and our hyper-centralised way of making decisions are right at the heart of it. I really hope you enjoy listening to this conversation as much as I enjoyed having it.

, and the Alderman responsible for transport and mobility policy. He took over the portfolio and immediately set about trying to make Ghent a more beautiful, peaceful city. As I can confirm from having visited, he really succeeded! But not without a lot of difficulty, even including death threats. Today’s episode is a masterclass in the art of transport changemaking: the focus on experimentation, clear strategy and the need for urgency. He also highlights the power of storytelling, the limitations of data and highlights that, despite the death threats, the Circulation Plan helped him increase his majority at the next election. Come with me to Belgium and see just what a motivated, inspiring transport changemaker can do.