Explore every episode of the podcast The Freewheeling Podcast

My guest this week is a transport changemaker attempting to achieve change in the most populous country on earth.

Ruchita Bansal is a transport and urban planner by background, and is now founder of SheCity.

Her research reveals the extra costs imposed on women by the transport choices of Indian leaders, and the wider impact this has on society and the Indian economy.

In today’s episode, she brings these impacts vividly to life, all set in the context of how Indian cities are designed by leaders not for citizens.

Jonathan Bray was Director of the Urban Transport Group and has spent the last year visiting suburbs all round Europe. He’s just published his findings, and it makes for a fascinating discussion.

He’s clear that there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to making sustainable transport work in suburbs. Instead, it’s all about the questions cities ask and the people they invite into the room when the decisions are taken.

In today’s episode, he takes me on a tour of different examples of best practice in Europe but focuses primarily on getting the questions right.

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…

During the pandemic, Anna Filby was a young transport professional struggling to connect with other young transport professionals.

So she created the Young Mobility Network.

Roll forward six years, it’s been such a success that it’s now her full-time job.

She joins me to discuss the challenges facing young people in our sector, what’s changed since I was starting out in my career and what it was like creating the YMN while holding down a full time job.

We’re also joined by Alessandro Zenati, who runs the London Hub of the Young Mobility Network as a volunteer.

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.

Last month, I hosted a special webinar for Transport Focus on Customer Experience in GBR.

Specifically, what will it look like if GBR is a customer experience disaster - and how do we stop that happening?

The specific goal was to avoid that happening by having the difficult conversations we need to have now, so we don’t need to have them then.

As I was hosting it, I thought my Freewheeling Podcast listeners would love it, so here it is.

I start with an interview with Linda Moir, who led customer experience at both Virgin Atlantic and London 2012.

Then we have a really crunchy panel discussion with Vernon Everitt (now Commissioner of Transport for Greater Manchester) about his time at TfL, Nick Haller (who looks after Customer Experience for Europe’s best railway, Swiss Federal Railways SBB), Marie Daly (who’s already leading an integrated public sector railway at Transport for Wales), Jacqueline Starr (the rail industry’s longtime customer champion at Rail Delivery Group) and Natasha Grice (director of Transport Focus).

It’s a really insightful conversation, which I wholeheartedly recommend!

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.

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.

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!

Jane Cole is MD of the best bus company in Britain, at least according to the judges of the UK Bus Awards. In fact, that’s not all: she also leads the best tram company in Britain, according to the judges who awarded them Tram Operator of the Year.

Today’s podcast is all about change, but it’s not primarily the sexy kind of technological change that we often think of when we think about change.

It’s about culture, community and people - but it’s the stuff that makes the difference between success and failure in the transport sector.

Jane describes the changes she’s made happen in Blackpool Transport and how empowerment, community focus and investment have transformed the transport service in one of the most deprived towns in Europe.

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!

The Budget has finally been unveiled.

But what does it mean for transport?

In this week’s episode, I review the budget with Sir Michael Holden, former Chairman of Directly Operated Railways.

We discuss the impact on railway economics (and whether there’s money for the fares freeze), whether the fuel duty increases will actually happen, the Government’s commitment to capital investment and - above all - the need for an overarching strategy.

The world’s moving faster than ever, and policy changes with dizzying pace.

It was only in 2021 that the Conservatives issued the most pro-bus policy document probably ever published by a British Government.

The National Bus Strategy was something of a marvel for those of us who want to see better public transport.

It promised a vision of bus lanes in every town, coordinated networks and exceptional quality - all backed up by billions of pounds of new investment.

Today, Leon Daniels and I look back in time to publication day and review how it’s gone since then.

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.

Why does electrification in the UK cost so much more than in the rest of Europe?

And why does it always seem to go wrong?

In today’s episode, I talk to Managing Director (UK) of Furrer+Frey, the leading Swiss engineering company.

We delve into the root cause of the problem: the way HM Treasury makes funding decisions, which results in a feast-famine environment in which teams are trained, mobilised, demobilised and the skills lost. Repeatedly.

We also discuss whether it’s going to get any better…

𝗙𝗶𝗹𝗶𝗽 𝗪𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗲𝘂𝘄 𝗶𝘀 𝘀𝗲𝗻𝗶𝗼𝗿 𝗱𝗲𝗽𝘂𝘁𝘆 𝗺𝗮𝘆𝗼𝗿 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗚𝗵𝗲𝗻𝘁, 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.

Founding a startup is hard, but it’s even harder when you’re dealing with the most painful and emotive moments in peoples’ lives.

That’s what Dan Garrett decided to do when he created Farewill, now the country’s largest “Deathtech” firm.

His business enables peoples to self-serve themselves wills, as well as offering other services including probate and even cremation.

How do you move fast when you’re dealing with something as important as death? How do you get the right balance between risk, rules and pace?

Mini Holland is the poster-child for the transformation of an urban area.

A network of congested residential streets in North East London has become peaceful and tranquil. The local high street converted from a double-parked rat-run into a desirable pedestrianised destination.

As the first Low Traffic Neighbourhood of the modern era, council reps from across Britain (and Europe) have visited to learn lessons.

Not that I needed travel far: it all happened in Walthamstow, where I live, and my kids were two of the many who benefited.

It was the vision of 𝗗𝗲𝗽𝘂𝘁𝘆 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝗳 𝗪𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗺 𝗙𝗼𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗖𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗹 𝗖𝗹𝘆𝗱𝗲 𝗟𝗼𝗮𝗸𝗲𝘀, and he tells me the full inspirational story in today’s episode.

Autonomous public transport has the potential to transform our cities.

Suburbs that are not currently served by public transport could be cost-effectively connected for the first time, while conventional bus routes could be expanded.

One city that is taking the lead in experimenting with autonomous public transport is Paris, under the leadership of James Dick at RATP.

In today’s episode, he tells me just how close he believes they are to delivering autonomous buses out on the road, driverless and at scale.

It’s a great conversation with a transport leader passionate about the future and making sure that our sector meets it head-on and with positivity.

Enjoy!

Gian-Mattia Schucan founded Fairtiq to make travelling by public transport effortless: no tickets, no gates, no stress. We talk about the journey from idea to reality, what operators really want from innovators and how to make change happen in public transport.

I’m sad to say that this is the last episode of Season 4 but, don’t worry, I’ll be back with Season 5 in September.

“It's fine when you're swinging big to have a few misses in a controlled environment” - 𝗝𝗼𝗻𝗻𝘆 𝗠𝗼𝗼𝗱, 𝗗𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗡𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗔𝘂𝗱𝗶𝘁 𝗢𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗲 making it very clear that it’s fine for public sector organisations to try things and fail.

In today’s episode, I talk to Jonny about what value for money really means, why BCR is often misused and how the NAO supports innovation in the public sector.

The conversation about BCRs is also fascinating: highlighting that value-for-money rules don’t require complex decisions to be boiled down to a single number.

Do take a listen to this one!

What happens when a rail consultant unexpectedly becomes an MP?

In this episode, I talk to Olly Glover MP about the chaos of election night, the shock of landing in Parliament and what the job of an MP really involves.

We explore why innovation is hard in legacy sectors like rail, and how the UK’s political system both helps and hinders progress.

Olly shares his frustrations with UK transport policy, his thoughts on rolling electrification and why he can’t stand Prime Minister’s Questions.

In this episode, I’m joined by Lars Strömgren, Vice Mayor for Transport and Urban Environment in Stockholm, and one of the people most responsible for Sweden’s cycling boom.

We explore how Stockholm went from a city with less than 1% cycling modal share in the 1980s to one of the most bike-friendly places in Europe. Lars reflects on how his childhood on his grandmother’s bike shaped his passion for urban planning, and why he sees infrastructure, narrative and community engagement as the holy trinity of sustainable mobility.

We talk about the normalisation of cycling (and how it shifted from working-class mode to middle-class badge of honour), the fight to introduce zero emission zones and how livable streets can go from controversial to loved.

Lars also shares why it’s hard to take a photo of clean air, but easy to show people enjoying a tree-lined street!

We also discuss some unexpected angles: how my local high street in Walthamstow inspired parts of Stockholm, what it means to use storytelling as a tool in planning and why building cities out of wood might be the next frontier in sustainability.

My guest this week is Anjali Devadasan, founder of Treeva, a startup generating energy from passing vehicles and trains. Her turbines harness airflow to power local infrastructure like lighting and EV chargers.

We talked about the technology, the challenges of scaling, and her personal drive to tackle climate change, inspired by her family’s personal experience of climate-change induced flash floods.

Anjali also shared great advice for founders around protecting time for strategy, running real world experiments and building around purpose.

A truly inspirational conversation with someone who’s achieved incredible things very early in her career.

In Oslo, Christian Willoch and his team at Ruter are doing something most cities haven’t even begun to talk about – using autonomous vehicles to strengthen public transport, not compete with it.

In this episode, I visit the pilot project they’ve got going, with real members of the public travelling on Ruter-branded autonomous vehicles in exactly the kind of outer suburb in which this technology will be transformative.

We talk about why Oslo's approach isn’t about robotaxis, but about public service and affordable mobility for all. Christian shares the lessons they’ve learned, the challenges ahead and why cities need to start planning now before they’re caught off guard.

Afterwards, I take a ride in one of their autonomous vehicles. You can listen into my live audio commentary of the experience…

Stephen Bush, Associate Editor at the Financial Times, is one of the few political journalists who truly gets transport policy.

In this episode, we talk about why transport matters far more to economic productivity than politicians realise, why ambition in major infrastructure projects has declined since the financial crisis and why simply nationalising services won't fix public transport.

Stephen also shares insights on why London’s success is the exception not the rule (and how its future success is not guaranteed) and we discuss whether a mayor of a major British city (Greater Manchester, for example) could become Prime Minister.

Elke Van den Brandt has transformed Brussels' streets – and taken a political battering for doing so.

As the city’s mobility minister, she’s championed slower speeds, safer roads and public spaces that feel more like “living rooms than corridors”.

We talk about her 30km/h city-wide limit, the backlash it sparked, the silent majority that supports it and the power of empathy, small projects and showing up in person.

It was a superb insight into how political bravery, behavioural science and empathy (backed up by strong leadership) can work together to reshape cities for the better.

Here’s a taster of what’s coming up in Season 4.

Subscribe to enjoy the full series!

For the last episode in Season 3, I’m joined by Tom Nutley of Urban Sharing to dive into the state of micromobility: what’s working, what isn’t - and why.

We explore the roots of the industry, from 1960s bike shares to the scooter boom, and discuss how cities have too often repeated past mistakes. Tom argues passionately that micromobility must be treated as part of the public transport ecosystem, with proper funding and infrastructure, and not just a revenue grab or VC play. We challenge both cities and operators to rethink their roles and stop pointing fingers, emphasising the urgent need for long-term integration, especially for underserved areas and first/last mile journeys.

Whether you're a policymaker, transport professional or just curious about urban mobility, this is a compelling and thought-provoking conversation about getting it right. Tom doesn’t hold back!

I’ll be back in May with Season 4!

Why is Britain’s economy so lopsided? In most developed countries, you don’t have to move to the capital to find the best jobs, yet in the UK, that’s still the reality for many. London dominates, while our second-tier cities (Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, etc) underperform compared to their European counterparts.

Paul Swinney, Director of Policy and Research at the Centre for Cities, has spent his career unpicking this puzzle. In this episode, we explore why Britain’s economic geography looks the way it does, what’s holding back regional growth, and what role transport plays in fixing it. Paul explains what agglomeration means and why it matters, why productivity isn’t just about skills and why intra-city transport is more important than rail links between cities.

We also dive into how post-pandemic work trends are reshaping transport economics, why the UK systematically underinvests in urban connectivity and why solving the North-South divide isn’t just about fairness—it’s about unlocking national economic potential.

Given we have a Government obsessed with growth, I really hope Rachel Reeves hears this one…

Most politicians either follow public opinion or get trapped in the orthodoxy of the established approach.

Lee Waters took a different route. As both Minister for Transport and Minster for Climate Change in Wales, he led some of the most radical shifts in UK transport policy: drastically curtailing road-building, introducing a national 20mph speed limit and putting in place the foundations of a European-style integrated public transport system.

But change is hard, and in this discussion, he lays bare the political resistance, entrenched car dependency and cultural battles that make sustainable transport such a tough sell. We explore why transport is often ignored in politics, how it’s the paperwork of design manuals and Treasury rules that quietly shape our world - and why politicians need to stop treating mobility like an economic formula and start seeing it as a social justice issue.

Lee also reflects on the personal toll of political leadership, the lessons he learned about winning public support for difficult changes and why even the most radical policies can become accepted norms - if you stick with them.

If you care about transport, politics or just how to get big changes over the line, this is an episode you won’t want to miss.

Frank Elter may be a part-time Professor, but he’s a very real-world professor.

As Chief Scientist and Vice President at Telenor Research, he’s responsible for innovation and planning for one of Norway’s telecoms giants.

He has thought deeply about how corporations can stay innovative. He’s thought about it concerning his work, and he’s researched at his university. He’s even written a book.

On this edition of The Freewheeling Podcast we talk about how modularity can help organisations be “ambidextrous” (i.e. able to focus on operations and innovation), and the fact that every approach creates new problems to solve.

He also tells a pretty remarkable story about how Telenor started its most innovative project to date!

The UK public sector spends somewhere between £300 billion and a trillion. A lot of that goes through public procurement processes.

That creates enormous innovation potential.

Yet, being honest, the words “public sector procurement” aren’t seen as synonyms for innovation.

This week, the new Procurement Act 2023 comes into force, so it seems a good time to stop and look at why public sector procurement is a challenge and what can be done about it.

My guest is a former colleague. I knew Rikesh Shah when he was a colleague as Head of Open Innovation at Transport for London, but now he heads up the Government’s Innovation Procurement Empowerment Centre.

In this conversation, we discuss how cultural barriers, such as fear of failure, hinder innovation in procurement and the barriers startups face in selling to the public sector.

Rikesh talks me through how the new Procurement Act introduces pre-market engagement as a requirement and he emphasises the benefits of a process called the Competitive Flexible Procedure.

Above all, though, it’s about the need for public sector organisations to embrace experimentation and iteration.

Why don’t we build homes people wish to live in? Terraced streets are popular and sustainable and support shops, services and transport, so why do we keep building low-density, car-dependent suburbs? And what needs to be done to create a nationwide tram renaissance?

These are just some of the questions I get into in discussion with David Milner, the MD of Create Streets.

Create Streets is a curious outfit: officially, it’s a design consultancy. But it has a policy and lobbying arm, and is highly influential with the current Government. Not bad for just 10 people…

If, like me, you would love to see some big changes in how we design and build towns, this is an episode you’ll enjoy.

Everyone agrees we need more sustainable transport but no-one has enough money to pay for it.

Could ‘land value capture’ be the answer? This is the approach where by transport lines are funded through the increases in the land value that the stations stimulate.

Well, George Hazel thinks so. In fact, he knows so, because he developed the land value capture method used for the recently-reopened Northumberland line.

In today’s episode he tells me how it works; but only after a fascinating discussion on the “Seven Deadly Wins” for making a city succeed.

Jarrett Walker has been designing bus networks for thirty years. From his consulting practice in Portland, Oregon, he’s built a specialism in helping cash-strapped local authorities optimise their networks through his business Jarrett Walker Associates.

And you can’t optimise if you don’t know what public transport is actually for and how you’re measuring whether or not it’s achieving those goals.

Eventually he’d done so much thinking on this topic that he wrote it all down in his book Human Transit.

In our conversation, he talks me through why it’s important to understand whether a transport network is seeking to optimise for coverage or patronage and how ‘access analysis’ can provide everyone with their own personal measure of public transport freedom.

Birmingham was the first city I lived in as a proper ‘grown-up’ and it was metamorphosing before my eyes.

Previously famous as Britain’s ‘car city’, it ripped up its inner ring road the year I arrived.

Today, the city centre is unrecognisable: spacious, walkable and with a brand new tram route snaking past brand new buildings.

Anne Shaw has been involved in this transformation since she first moved to Birmingham in 1991 to take up a job as a drainage engineer.

Today she’s Executive Director of Transport for the West Midlands, and she tells me just how this extraordinary change has been achieved.