To listen to the podcast: https://soundcloud.com/momentum-transport/s2-1-conversations-in-momentum-leon-daniels-obe-on-future-cities
Or read below:
Mailys Garden:
Hi everyone, and welcome to a brand new season of Conversations in Momentum, brought to you by the teams at Momentum Transport Consultancy and Momentum Transport Canada. I’m Mailys Garden.
Joe Tang:
I’m Joe Tang. It’s amazing to think, Mailys, that we’ve got season one under our belts now and really looking forward to kicking off season two today.
Mailys Garden:
Yeah, me too, I know. And what a treat we have today to get our second season underway, we’re honored to be joined by Leon Daniels, OBE. And to tell you a little bit more about Leon, he’s recognized for his world-class experience, expertise, and knowledge of public sector transport in the UK, Europe, and the Far East. And until his retirement from TfL in December 2017, Leon brought his unique range of in-depth skill and experience to his role as Managing Director, Surface Transport at Transport for London. He was responsible for the successful delivery of transport during what has been named ‘the most successful public transport games ever’ in London 2012. And since then, Leon has been responsible for numerous major events in London, such as RideLondon and the London Marathon, and has also been in charge during unexpected major incidents.
Leon continues to make a significant contribution to the progress of global thinking on road and vehicle safety, efficiencies and the social effects of autonomous vehicles and technical developments generally on road and rail. He is passionate about ensuring that the lessons of the past are fully recognized in planning for the future, and his expertise is sought by international agencies, governments, and local authorities across the world. Leon was awarded an OBE for Services to Transport by Her Majesty the Queen’s and the 2019 New Year’s Honours List.
Wow. Thank you so much for joining us today, Leon. We’re so delighted to have you this morning.
Leon Daniels:
Mailys, thank you very much indeed. I thought you were going to occupy most of the podcasts with the preamble. So this is a really interesting thing for me because I have my own podcast series, which is called Lunch with Leon, get it from wherever you get your podcasts from. And I’m into about 70 episodes now, which has been running for a while, but I’m normally in charge of the interview and this time you are in charge of the interview and I’m the interviewee. So this is a whole new experience for me and I’m really looking forward to it.
Joe Tang:
Well, I hope you enjoy being on the other end of it today. It’s great to have you with us. Thank you, just echoing Mailys’ thanks for joining us. So Leon, we always start our first segment at Conversations in Momentum by asking our guests to share a transport-related story or highlight from their career. I suspect after Mailys’ intro, this might be the trickiest question we ask you today given all that experience. But are you able to choose one story which stands out in amongst your work?
Leon Daniels:
Well, of course for four years or so, I work daily with Boris Johnson, so I have hundreds of highlights, stories that I could share. Some of them will have to wait for my book, which one day I’ll have to write. But of course, as you say, because I’m very old and I’ve been in this industry for a long time, 45 years or so, I have loads of highlights. And many of those highlights are about people, especially the young people, promising young people, people never thought they’d be in transport who are really enjoying it. But I know you want a scandalous one, so here it is. So in order to make the London Olympics work in 2012, we had to suppress all of the demand by 30%. That’s commuters, shoppers, freight deliveries. Because to create the space for the Olympic family to move between all the venues, between the hotels, the Olympic Park, we had to get 30% of it down.
So we spent years literally knocking door-to-door, making sure that every frontager, every retailer, everybody possible knew that they should retime their journey, remode their journey, rearrange their journey, and simple things like getting a new photocopy or paper delivered, getting twice as much of it in July so you didn’t need a delivery in August. Those were simple, but what about barrels of beer? What about fresh food? What about the supermarkets? And so on. So we worked very hard to get this 30% down. Anyway, on the morning of the opening ceremony in 2012, it was a Friday morning, a phone call from government. I’m not going to name who in the government, but a phone call from the government that said, “We don’t think you’ve done enough. This is going to be a disaster. You haven’t done enough. People are going to carry on as normal. The Olympic family is going to descend on us and it’s going to be a disaster. And we just want you to know that your name’s on it.” Thanks. That was Friday.
Opening ceremony Friday night, first game Saturday, Sunday, and then we get to the first peak hour Monday, and surprise surprise, there is tumbleweed blowing down the center of Oxford Street. It’s like a scene from 28 Days Later, there’s just nobody there. And the same person from her Majesty’s government rang and said, “You’ve overcooked this.” So that just tells you just a little bit about how difficult it is dealing at the highest level of government. And the answer of course was, and none of the previous host cities had ever told us this. Then in week one, first half of week one, actually at the games we’re only doing relatively low level heats. And actually it is not until you get into the second half of week one that the place really starts to warm up and all the venues are getting out, and eventually you get really good quality athletics and sports and activities going on.
Where was everybody? Well, they’d gone to Stonehenge and Windsor Castle and Bath. So the Olympic family had gone sightseeing, which is why it was all very quiet, but in fact it really warmed up and we had a fantastic Olympic Games. And I’m really proud to be associated with it.
Mailys Garden:
This is a brilliant story, Leon. Thank you so much for sharing it. And it’s not as scandalous as I was hoping, but that’s fine, I think it’s still a really good story. And to me it really shows the importance of what we do in transport, the importance of getting it right, and sometimes the trickiness of that. If you do your job correctly, essentially no one will notice it. It is whenever something goes wrong that people will start complaining about transport and the impact that it has on pursuing our daily lives, really. What I’d like to talk to you today is about the future cities, and I know you’re an advocate for future cities. And I was wondering if you could tell us why the idea of the future city is so important to you?
Leon Daniels:
I think we have seen across the world increasingly the repopulation of cities, and the reasons for why this has been happening I think are very strong. I think we’ve all seen cases where people have moved further and further out of cities as they’re trying to afford and get the space that they need in a home for a growing family. So in practice, people move further and further out, they get bigger property, it’s not quite so expensive and they’re swapping beautiful, perhaps rural properties for the city, but that leaves them with the extended journey times to make those journeys to and from their place of work, perhaps increased costs. And then of course what happens is the kids leave home and then the two of you as you’re getting older are rattling around in this big property. And at the point in your life when you need services, healthcare, access to shopping and so on, you’re in the middle of nowhere and you are basically a hostage to a private car.
And what I’ve seen young people do increasingly is not to go down that route, but this repopulation of cities, especially where that’s combined with taking old buildings, old warehouses, old factories, old offices and so on, and repurposing them as residences. And I think that’s very exciting because this fits with young people in particular often choosing to rent rather than buy. And I don’t just mean their homes, but also their phones and their transport and all the rest of what you need. So I’m very excited that cities are growing here in London. We’ve got more people living here in London than at any time in since World War II and this opportunity to live and work in a city where you’ve got museums, and galleries, and restaurants, and cinemas and beautiful walks and you’re only a short distance away. So in terms of your own health and so on, walking and cycling is so much more of an option there than it would be.
The private car is almost irrelevant and under city conditions, public transport can often be so good. So I like the idea of cities and I only ever lived in the countryside briefly, it was short. So I didn’t stay there very long. So much better to be in a place where it took 24 hours a day, seven days a week, things are happening. And then as an extension of that, I’m very excited about a concept which I can only partially define, but cleverer people than I can build on it, which is the sort of idea of a self-healing city, a city that’s able to adjust to all the changes as we’ve seen very dramatically through COVID, where we’re seeing quite a change in commuting habits, we’re seeing a change in leisure habits, we’re seeing a change in the way in which people organize their work. We are conducting this, we’re not all together, we were doing this online. We don’t need to come together for everything.
So I’d rather like the idea of a self-healing city, one that is organized and built in such a way that it copes with all the stuff that life throws at it, and it just swallows it down and keeps on thriving. There’s lots of ways we can think about that, but the key ingredients have to be the ability to walk and cycle, the provision of generous and inexpensive public transport, very, very low reliance on the private car and having enough density in the city so that communities can exist and support each other, and so on. So that’s my dream of a city. Whether that will be achieved, for example in Neom in Saudi Arabia, who knows whether it’ll be achieved in many of the other developments, especially that we’re seeing in the Middle East. I don’t know. But it just feels to me that, increasingly, people are increasingly enjoying banding together so that they’re in a mutual assistance and easy living place. And as you get older, all those services that you need when you are old and infirm are right next door, which I think is really good.
Joe Tang:
That does sound brilliant indeed. It’s definitely a tussle that we’re having with at the moment from a personal end in terms of moving out to the countryside for more space or staying in somewhere like London and enjoying all the amenities it has to offer, all the transport links, everything that comes with it. So yeah, definitely something close to my heart personally on that front as well. One of the points you make, Leon, on future cities is that cities all over the world are facing similar challenges, and you’re obviously very passionate about learning from past mistakes on transport developments. I was just wondering if you could give us a few examples from your work around the world where lessons have been taken on board and cities have done a particularly good job at learning from the past.
Leon Daniels:
Oh, I think there are just thousands of examples there. It was very interesting back in February when I was in Sydney, the light rail that’s now such an important part of the central business district of Sydney. When those tram tracks were being laid as part of the excavation works, they uncovered the tracks from the previous trams that existed in George Street in Sydney. So there’s a case where a city’s learnt by its mistakes, it replaced its electric trams. The centre of Sydney became a mecca for the private cars and crowded pavements. Now it’s got this wonderful light rail system back in there. There’s a great case of a city learning from its mistakes. I just came back yesterday from Cape Town. They haven’t quite learned by this mistake yet. I don’t know. This is all fresh. So in Cape Town, South Africa, they drive on the left-hand side of the road like we do in the UK and like we do, I have to say in 70 other nations around the world.
So every time Koras has somebody from a trailer park in America saying, “Why does Britain drive on the wrong side of the road?” The answer is that 70 countries around the world, including Japan, all drive on the left. Anyway, back to Cape Town. So some point in the past, about 10 or 11 years ago, somebody persuaded Cape Town that what the city really needed for its buses were high floor articulated buses with the doors on the right, that’s to say the opposite side to the curb so that they could do a sort of pretend bus rapid transit in the city. So what have we got? We’ve got articulated buses, 11, 12 years old, high floor, can only be worked by docking at certain cathedrals that have been built across the bus route.
And at a time when the world wants low access and frequent and flexible buses, here we’ve got something that’s totally inflexible and can only stop at the places that have been built at great expense. And they can’t be used anywhere else and they can’t be repurposed, and they’ll be expensive to replace because nobody builds a high floor, right-hand door, single [inaudible 00:14:46] bus are really expensive. And it runs on a reinforced concrete base which doesn’t have any adhesion. So they have to spray the adhesion on it to make the tires grip. But a reinforced concrete doesn’t have much given it, so it chews the tires up. My goodness me, you couldn’t make a longer catalogue of mistakes in transport.
And I know what they’re aiming at and I can understand a little bit how this came to be. The great thing about rail and therefore with light rail is that it looks permanent. You’ve got tracks in the ground, you’ve got overhead power. It feels like it might be there for a while, and therefore property developers will develop on the footprint of rail and light rail, whereas bus here today, gone tomorrow potentially. So I understand there is a move to make bus a bit sexier in order that it looks a bit more like rail, it looks like it’s more permanent and so on. But here’s a case where I think the passage of time demonstrate that it’s really not the right thing at all. So I do just hope, and to answer your question directly, where learning from mistakes are very important. There are no better experts than your own passengers and your own staff.
It’s good to look around the world and learn lessons, but my goodness, I’ve seen cities spend 10 years traveling around the world looking at other examples, and actually we need action now. So I would just encourage cities to be bold, but give most weight to the needs of the community, the passengers and the expert staff, which is all levels of the staff from the bottom to the top, because that’s the sort of city I think people want. And just importing an idea from somewhere else around the world is no guarantee of success.
Joe Tang:
Absolutely. And a huge amount of work there goes into consultations, things like that, doesn’t it? With local workers, operators, the public. So yeah, always a hugely important set of brains to pick when you’re making any development come to fruition. When you’re talking about the future city, obviously technology will also play a key role in all of this. You’ve got things like improved information streams, e-scooters, autonomous vehicles, et cetera, that are all going to be coming into play. I was just wondering if we could get your thoughts, Leon, on the support that tech will need to help fulfill its potential in the future city.
Leon Daniels:
Yeah. And of course we are recording this, aren’t we? In the immediate aftermath of Paris voting to ban e-scooters? Well, you can try and push water uphill, but frankly what’s happening across the world is that all the traditional gaps between walking, conventional cycling, motor scooters and four wheels are all being filled in. And e-scooters, for example, just one example of a gap that’s being filled in. The technology’s happening faster than the legislation, so they’re all in a sort of environmental no man’s land. We’ve had proposals here in London for electric scooters, more powerful electric scooters. We’re filling in the gaps. And as I say, you can try very hard, but people will always exploit the deficiencies in the legislation. And to take the e-scooters point on, there’s a debate here in the UK, because as you know they’re illegal except in certain carefully defined trial areas, which includes London.
I think e-scooters are rather fun. I had my first experience on one in Stockholm, much to the amusement of my colleagues when I rolled up at the restaurant on one, parked it, photographed it. So I think personal mobility will continue to be very important for people. On the wider issue, I’m pretty sure that autonomous vehicles will first appear in the sort of super-taxi products in the suburbs and on the edges of cities. And why is that? Well, autonomous vehicles are expensive. A little three, four-seater bubble thing for you is very unlikely, much more likely to be in the size of vehicle that’s more than six seats, but less than 16 operating in the suburbs where regular public transport is very expensive to provide, where people need more of a door-to-door sort of service. And what are people likely to do? Wait for the half-hourly bus service out to wherever it is you live in the suburbs, followed by a walk in the dark, which may or may not be very pleasant, or are you going to get in a sort of autonomous super-taxi?
I’m not using the four-letter generic word for private hire vehicles, the one that begins with a U. But if you’re in some sort of super-taxi autonomous, which is picking up and setting down efficiently and you’ve taken the driver out of the cost equation, it’s super cheap. So that’s where I think autonomous vehicles will arrive. And I’m fascinated by one other area, this may sound a bit crazy, but between New York and Boston, there’s a dozen different coach services. And they’re not just competing on price, they’re also competing on quality and they’re also competing on other things like religion and ethnic background. So there’s a Chinese one and there’s a Jewish one. So people are choosing by religion or ethnic background to travel with the groups of people. So therefore I just throw this out there for technology.
And let’s just take the Uber example as a case in point, but by Uber I mean an app-based demand-responsive private ride-share vehicle. What if the software would allow you to choose your ride-sharing companions? So for example, somebody that agreed with you on football or disagreed with you on football? Or disagreed with you on politics? Or shared your religious beliefs? Or was opposed to your religious beliefs? Now just imagine dialling up a menu on your ride-share app where you got to ride with a person that you wanted to ride with either to have a healthy debate or to smother each other in warm appreciation for them being so brilliant because they shared your view. Doesn’t matter which. Do you see my point? I wonder whether there isn’t a intellectual speed dating possibility in the ride-share app, so you were traveling with or not with people you had some similarity or affinity with or so on.
Now of course, the narrower you make your options, the longer you may wait for your ride-share. So if you leave all the boxes unticked, well, you’ll almost certainly get the first one because you don’t care who you travel with. But in all my ride-share experiences, in particular in the U.S., I have never yet found somebody is my ride-sharing companions that I wasn’t interested in one way or another. So I just wonder whether there’s something we play there. I know there needs to be some safeguards and I know there’s all sorts of issues relating to that, but there have to be any way of course. So if you’ve had a chance to watch the film Endangered, which relates to a Uber-like driver who picks up one last fare at the end of the day and it turns out to be a complete nightmare. Of course, so there have to be some protections in there, but I’m just fascinated as to whether that would make ride-share journeys more enjoyable. There we are. That’s for free. There’s no copyrights on that. You can sell that to your clients and charge them huge fees for it.
Mailys Garden:
Thanks, Leon. That’s a really interesting analysis and I really like how we’ve moved a conversations from talking about buses that want to be trains and talking about mass transit and the benefits of that, and particularly the symbolic benefit of having that infrastructure that doesn’t go anywhere in the short term. And then talking about personal mobility, the role of technology in demand-responsive transport, and how that leads us into understanding the finer grain of journeys which are not necessarily from A to B but might involve A to B to C to D, as part of the same journey on the way to work, for instance. And I’m really interested in your idea of sort of self-selecting who you want to travel with. Obviously being in cities is being with others and being sort of in a very diverse place. And that’s one of the benefits for me, as far as I’m concerned, is being confronted with people that travel differently, that have different needs.
And I think it’s really important for cities to accommodate that. So I guess I’d like to take us on a slightly different conversation now, because I’m particularly passionate about diversity in the transport industry and I’m very lucky to work with women in transport. And at Momentum, we believe that our team has to be made up with people from diverse backgrounds if we want to successfully design cities for all people. And I know that’s also something that you champion. So I’d like to ask you if you think that we are doing enough, and what else we could do as an industry, not just Momentum, what else we could do to ensure that future transport leaders represent the diversity of the passengers carried and the staff employed?
Leon Daniels:
Look, that’s very important to me and I had no greater warm feeling inside when I addressed the Women in Transport in Malaysia conference in Kuala Lumpur pre-COVID. And I’m going back there late this year to do the same. Rows and rows of Muslim women with the whole face covering and dress, rows of them young Muslim women with their hands up asking, “How do I get into the transport industry? How do I get into traffic engineering? How do I get into traffic signal engineering? How do I get into rail engineering? How do I get into highway construction? How do I get into influential positions in the transport business?” No warmer feeling can anyone feel than that enthusiasm from a group of people who by gender and religion are thoroughly underrepresented in transport. And that is so exciting. So I think it’s going in the right direction.
And it’s fascinating that we get white-head, old person, male like me to go and talk to them, but they’re bristling with the enthusiasm and we have to do something about making it a career of choice, not just a career that people fall back into because they couldn’t get into some of the more other possibilities that people have, whether it’s computer games or technology or journalism or whatever it is wanting people in this area. So look, trend is going the right direction. Generationally, it will happen anyway because as younger people bubble into important positions, it’s got critical mass and we’re going in the right direction. But we do just have to make sure that everybody’s behaviors are correct, that there are the appropriate facilities for everybody who wants to join into the transport sector, that we’ve got proper safeguards in place and so on.
And it just has to be the case that more women rise to senior positions and start to really cause changes in direction and so on, to encourage more. But it is the diversity of thought that’s important as well as diversity in a gender or religious connotation. It is a diversity of thought. It is about having people who think differently, which is helped no end by the diversity, but just whose brains are wired differently and are great challenges to the way in which we do things. And I am absolutely passionate about it. I’ve seen considerable improvements. So a bit patchy, globally. It’s a bit patchy, but if I just look around the UK, Chief Executive of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport here is a lady. The Chief Executive of the Chartered Institute of Highways and Transportation is a lady. When I worked at FirstGroup, MD Bus and MD Rail were both women.
So it is starting to work its way through. I think gender equality is traveling in a different trajectory to other forms of diversity, but some of that is a bit difficult to do because in certain communities, there are concentrations of people of a certain religious or national background. So it’s a bit harder to do, but I do think it’s all going in the right direction. But when I think diversity, we must look beyond people’s color and religion and gender, we must think about diversity of thought. Because with diversity of thought, we really do get to challenge and make exciting things. And I can remember when Mike Brown was the commissioner for transport in London, he banged the table and said, “Frankly, the women on my team are better than the men.” I’m not quite sure what metric he was using for that, but it made a very powerful point to everybody concerned. That was his view and therefore that was TfL’s view and everybody sat up and took notice.
Joe Tang:
Oh, really interesting. And yeah, definitely something that we’re hoping is going in the right direction in the future. I’d just like to squeeze in one final question if I may, for our session. If you could make one change, Leon, to the way transport works in a city, what would it be and why?
Leon Daniels:
Well, I’m going to bring it back home to London and predates my period in TfL, but I’m just going to champion the London arrangement, and forgive me for doing that, because people think I always do that. But honestly, I’ve seen plenty of transport systems around the world and I continue to say this, the benefit of an integrated transport authority with highway powers, traffic movement powers, responsibility for bus, rail, light rail, tram, cable car, et cetera, is something to really be [inaudible 00:30:38]. You have a look in New York. There’s a ports authority and a transport authority. In London, we’ve got an integrated transport authority under an all-powerful mayor. Putting aside the politics, whoever is the mayor has significant powers on planning land use, fares, ticketing, and the provision of transport. So the first thing to say is many cities around the world could make much better progress if they rolled all of those powers into one entity. And there are very few properly integrated transport authorities around the world, London is one of them.
Strong political leadership. Ken Livingston reversed a decline in public transport in London, which had gone on for 50 years. Every year, public transport just ebbed away further and further down. Ken Livingston, when he became the first mayor of London in 2000, reversed that and said, “I’m having plentiful public transport and I’m having cheap fares.” And here’s why. Public transport lubricates the economy. That’s how kids get to school. That’s how people get to work. That’s how people look for work. That’s how they get to the theatre, to the restaurant, to the cinema. That’s how they go and visit. It is the lubrication of the whole city’s economy, and the cost, that’s to say the difference between the revenue it generates and the cost to provide it is small compared with all the social benefits that accrue to that. So I champion frequent 24-hour efficient public transport in all forms, affordable fares paid for by a levy on somebody or something, which could be the rich and famous. It could be property, it could be business, whatever. Because the benefits to the city are just so huge.
And if you don’t do that, you are either a hostage to the private car or you’re a hostage to the private hire car market, none of which is under your control. Add to that, some strong powers to constrain private car usage, including road-user charging. But not just road-user charging, confiscating the space that is freed up and handing it over to walking and cycling. So people say, “Look, London is very congested. It’s as congested as it was.” Yes, but we’ve taken half the road space away. So people ignore the wider footways, they ignore the cycle tracks, they ignore the pavement cafes, they ignore all of those things that is confiscated road space that was previously private car occupied.
So in terms of the difference, you asked for one change, I’m trying to group all those changes into one. But bold political leadership with strong powers and an ethos to suppress the private car and deliver cheap and plentiful public transport of the sort that’s under your control as opposed to giving it away to things that are not under your control, I think makes a substantial improvement to a city. And forgive me for using the London example. I’m just very proud of it and proud of it as a user.
Mailys Garden:
This is excellent. Thank you so much, Leon. It actually echoes a lot of articles and essays I was writing at university a long time ago now. And we were talking a lot about governance and it seemed a bit like an empty concept until I came to London and seeing a sort of unified authority looking at all of the different transport modes and ways of accommodating that on city streets. And that’s where I’ve understood the true meaning of that. And I think you’ve explained it beautifully and the importance of the political leadership to drive it forward. So really thank you so much for taking the time to share all of those thoughts with us today. It’s really been amazing to chat with you, Leon. Thank you so much.
Leon Daniels:
Mailys, look, it’s been a great pleasure. Joe as well. This has been great therapy. So if I could lie on your couch on a Tuesday every month or so, that would be hugely beneficial to my own mental health. So I’ve found it very enjoyable to think through some of those issues and say it out loud in coherent or fairly coherent sentences. Anyway, so I’ve enjoyed it immensely and thank you very much indeed for the opportunity.
Joe Tang:
Well, thank you very much for coming. It’s been an absolute pleasure to have you, Leon.
Leon Daniels:
Thanks very much.
Joe Tang:
And we hope you, the listener, has enjoyed the discussion as well today. As always, we’ll be keeping the conversations going on LinkedIn where you can find us at Momentum Transport Consultancy, and Momentum Transport Canada. And please do follow the podcast to make sure you don’t miss any of our future episodes.
Mailys Garden:
So from all of us at Conversations In Momentum, bye for now and we’ll see you next time.
