What's the biggest obstacle to high quality services in our country?

It's may not be fair to say the Daily Mail but it is the Daily Mail Test.

Organisations are so scared something will go wrong that they suffocate their people in controls and rules.

Public transport isn’t just about competing with cars: it’s competing in the attention economy.

We need to upskill.

Most organisations use management consultants in the wrong way for the wrong reasons.

Today’s post is about how I learned the right way to use them - and includes real-life examples of getting it wrong.

From private equity to pension funds to management buy-outs, Britain’s transport operators are now in very different hands. Part 2 explores what that means for investment, risk and the future of public transport.

The era of publicly listed transport operators is almost over, but hardly anyone has noticed it ending. This two-part post explores how PLCs once dominated public transport, and why they’ve all but vanished from the sector today.

HS2 has become a case study in how not to build infrastructure. But what if we’d taken a different path entirely?

In this post, I imagine how the Swiss would have done it: starting with the timetable, not the project. It’s a counterfactual, but it’s not a fantasy.

AI is happening.

I don’t buy into the argument that humans are finished, but I do think that the world of work will radically change. My worry is that transport won’t keep up with the pace of change.

Here’s what I think will happen and what we need to do.

We treat AI like it’s new. But this isn’t the first time aggressive capitalists have pushed a new technology into an uncertain world: it happened with trains 200 years ago, and 100 years ago it happened with cars.

Those experiences taught us the danger of unregulated technology before. Now we need to choose again.

Some decisions are like haircuts: easy to change. Others are like tattoos: permanent, visible, hard to undo. Major infrastructure projects fall firmly in the tattoo category.

In a previous post, I advised that for “haircut” projects, we should just get on with it.

But what do we do about “tattoo” projects? That’s what today’s post is about.

Bus Service Improvement Plans were the centrepiece of the National Bus Strategy. But what did they achieve for their money?

A detailed review of the 2025 Comprehensive Spending Review from a transport perspective.

From long-term city region funding and capital rule reform to the lack of a national strategy and underinvestment in London, this post explores what the Review gets right - and where it falls short

We assume Great British Railways must be a single organisation, but must it?

Some of the best railways in the world - like Switzerland’s - aren’t centralised, they are deliberately fragmented.

This post explores how fragmentation can drive pride, quality and resilience.

Sameness is not the same as Consistency, and neither are the same as Predictability.

As the new GBR brand is launched, this is a post about creating new transport brands - and understanding the difference between these three crucial terms.

Everyone in the rail industry is waiting for a big reveal of the new structure of Great British Railways. But based on my experience (and a few hard-learned lessons), I argue that we’re starting in the wrong place.

Fix the incentives first - the structure can follow.

For thousands of years, humans have tried to predict the future, from cracking turtle shells to financial models. Here’s why we still get it wrong and how we can build better business cases.

Coventry “Very Light Rail” promises to HALVE the cost of building new tram lines.

Is that really credible? Let’s find out.

The biggest barrier to progress in transport isn’t politics, funding, or structures — it’s decision-making. But decision-making processes are human-made, and we can rebuild them. Drawing on lessons from Amazon and others, I share four simple tools that any transport organisation can start using tomorrow to move faster and more effectively. I

Nationalising the railways won’t fix anything unless we focus on aligning incentives and delivering for customers.

What rural transport really needs isn’t innovation - it’s buses: properly integrated and proudly delivered, like in Switzerland.

Here’s my first-hand report from the front line of great rural transport.