3 things I've learnt about transport from hosting a transport podcast

Back in 2018, I started the Byte Size podcast. The whole purpose behind producing the show was to seek out and spotlight the amazing people, businesses, and innovations that are happening in transport and city planning, right underneath our noses. As someone that currently works in a startup within transport, I thought surely there has to be more of us out there that see the amazing possibilities to make our cities better places to live.

Before recording every episode, I’ve gotten into a habit of calling the guest. No matter the topic of the episode, or the expert in question, the same 3 themes are consistently raised in conversation. And It got me thinking. Maybe if more people are aware of these issues, something can be done about them.

Don't underestimate the importance of innovation

The Australian transport industry is not really known for being innovative. Lauren Bourke, National Transport Manager at Randstad, explained to me that transport doesn't even make the top 10 on a list of desirable industries to work in. If I had a dollar for every guest I’ve talked to whom has stated “I wish there was more emphasis and acceptance for innovation in transport”, I’d have at least $85. Almost every single person I have talked to, regardless of their background or area of expertise, believes that one of the best things we could do to change both the image of the transport sector, and the actual transport sector itself, is encourage, foster, and reward innovation.

Dave Jones, the External Affair Director at Smartlite Group, raised a fantastic perspective in our episode; Consider this a call to arms on both sides — we need to spur innovation-seeking behaviours from our representatives in government, but we as the general population need to avoid publicly chastising them too. 

If an attempt at innovation doesn’t go to plan, It’s really easy to tell the public sector where to stick it (or to tell them how you think you’d do a way better job if you were in their shoes). But, if we really want this to work for everyone, we both need to play ball to incite consistent and meaningful change. Dave has the experience to back this up too — he worked in the public sector for over 10 years.

We need more diversity

This doesn’t just refer to sex or gender. It refers to race, religion, socio-economic status, and age. We need to stop asking the same kind of people — people that look like the ones who are already in charge — about what to do to improve transport. It serves as a convenient echo-chamber with a cookie-cutter effect; everyone’s experiences match those around them, so where’s the motivation to change things that are perceived to already work?

In NSW, public transport trip satisfaction data is not sex-disaggregated, and people under the age of 17 are intentionally excluded from the survey. What we end up with is an aggregated, muddy, and exclusive view about our transport network that unintentionally glazes over the experience of different subsets of our population. 

In an episode about mobility with Dr Yale Wong, international advisor and social entrepreneur at Dr Transportation, Yale discussed the need to design public transport assets with the user in mind, and have decision makers personally undertake more frequent audits on services. But this change starts from the top. To truly enact meaningful and inclusive change within our transport networks, we need to minimise the disconnect between those who run transport services, and those who use them.

Consumers need to change their behaviours too

As convenient as it might be, we can’t blame all of this on the government. Consumers have a huge role to play too. As Australians, we love our cars.

In a recent conversation with Rachel Smith - a fantastic woman and business owner involved in transport planning, project managing, and urban planning - we discussed ideas for an upcoming podcast episode. We discussed the possibly that the pandemic could have set public transport ridership levels and growth back by almost 20 years, as users were working from home and continually fearful of community transmissions. But even in a country like Australia, who has fared quite well in the last few months despite the prevalence of COVID-19 in other economies, ridership on public transport has tanked. Public transport usership fell as much as 81%, depending on where you look. Meanwhile, car-ridership has peaked above pre-pandemic levels. 

Now, I also realise this is a bit of a Catch 22 — you don’t like the current public transport options or they aren’t accessible, so you don’t use them. This then impacts funding, which then impacts the decisions you make about alternative transport options, which impacts the options available to you. But nothing changes (or ever will) if our behaviour stays the same and we continue to shun new public transport offerings or micro-mobility infrastructure.

Conclusions

This is by no means an extensive list. After all, these are only three of a whole plethora of issues and 'hot topics' that have been brought to my attention. One thing that is quite clear though, is that change is starting; we just need it to encourage it and keep the momentum going.