Sonny you look like the director in your chair.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
unknownFar away.
SPEAKER_02What am I looking at you?
SPEAKER_05Are we good?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
Hello.
SPEAKER_03Hello.
SPEAKER_11Hello, and welcome to the latest Talking Transport podcast from London Travel Watch.
SPEAKER_08I'm Tricia Hayes, Alex Smith, Sasha Langerbald, Lara Snowlack, Trevor Rosenberg. And I'm very pleased today that we're going to be speaking to Shun Hayward.
SPEAKER_03Claire Waters.
SPEAKER_08Alex Campbell.
SPEAKER_03Max Croucher.
SPEAKER_08John McGeehee and Michael.
Do you think that cash is going to continue to be an important payment mechanism on London's transport system for this foreseeable future?
SPEAKER_04A lot of people that are digitally excluded and older people are more likely to depend on cash. And I know that's something that Travel Watch has been particularly focused on and making sure those people are still able to make the journeys that they need to make.
SPEAKER_12For those people who have no option but to use cash, it's fundamentally important that they still have that ability. For example, as indeed London Travel Watch colleagues managed to secure before, when cash was retained as an option at tube stations, they can turn up a tube station and pay by cash. The sting in the tail at the moment is if they buy a paper ticket using cash, they're going to be paying over the odds compared with if they used a different form of payment method.
SPEAKER_01More and more people are being encouraged to have their tickets on their phone. Now I've even succumbed to it and then buy my daily tickets and their e-tickets. But unfortunately, there are times when batteries die on phones. And because it's the passenger's responsibility to ensure they are able to show a valid ticket upon request, if the phone dies, they can't.
SPEAKER_04We've got this kind of rush to making everything as digital as possible. And I think there's a real risk that some people are left behind by that.
Personal security is something that Len and Shabboch have done a lot of work on. I think there's an old podcast on it as well, if anyone's interested.
SPEAKER_00Specifically on personal security, fundamentally, our responsibility as TFL is to run a safe and reliable public transport network and to ensure that people make active travel choices so that we can all see a future for the capital which is safe and green and inclusive and sustainable. So we want people to feel confident to walk and cycle, we want people to feel confident that you travel by public transport. And it's our responsibility to make sure that transport network is reliable and it's safe and it feels welcoming.
SPEAKER_09Personal security seems to be of increasing importance to people. Whether that's driven by real changes in threats to personal security or whether it's reflecting wider social trends, difficult to say at the moment. And I I wouldn't want to make a call on that till we've done some more research.
SPEAKER_06A
type of transport that is so important to so many people is buses. I would both do buses, but I imagine there's some quite different issues in different areas.
SPEAKER_10In London, there's a sort of understanding that buses are vital for London to keep moving. Nobody argues with that. Outside, that's becoming less and less of an argument now.
SPEAKER_04I think it is for maybe all ages, the transport mode that older Londoners take the most. So if you look at the Freedom Pass, for example, 220 million Freedom Pass journeys out of a total of about 270 altogether, 220 million, so that's what 75% or something, are made on buses. And I think that's partly a story of what those journeys are for. So obviously, more likely to be more local journeys, particularly kind of everyday things like shopping, but also accessing services or you know, getting to a health centre two or three miles away, that sort of thing.
SPEAKER_10There's one sure way of seeing how important a bus is, is to take it away, and then everybody goes nuts.
SPEAKER_04Having to change buses can make the journey a lot harder, whether it's someone that's maybe struggling with their mobility or they're having to wait a lot longer in bad weather conditions and that sort of thing.
And from your experience inside London and outside London, interesting to get your perspective on what kind of the main differences you think you can see?
SPEAKER_09In rural areas, the bigger areas of concern will be not so much around punctuality, perhaps around availability and whether a service is actually running. Because as you can imagine, if there's fewer services running in a rural area, that can really make the difference between getting somewhere or literally not getting somewhere. In urban areas, it's more things about timing and punctuality, which tends to come to the fore.
SPEAKER_10Most people in London don't live right next to a station or within five minutes' walk. So they're usually catching a bus to get to a station. So I think it's something that other larger places could certainly understand. Is that yes, they might have a service that takes you to the station, but I can't tell you how many times I've seen it where the bus comes in and the train has gone like 30 seconds a minute before.
But our case working team in so many ways is kind of the heart of what we do as an organization. I mean, both because of the way in which it helps people get themselves out of sticky situations. And like you, I've seen lots and lots of great stories about results that have been achieved by our case working team.
SPEAKER_01This lady came to us that her daughter had on her oyster card that she had topped up disappearing money. I say inadverted commas because she couldn't understand it. So I think she'd been to TFL and they couldn't help. So she came to us, and again, it was through the relationships that we build with TFL and the other train companies that I knew the people to go and ask and speak to, and they were able to say, no, the oyster card had been used for these journeys.
SPEAKER_12For those, you know, dissatisfied people who came to us and thought all hope was gone. Working with actually with our sister watchdog, Transport Focus, on the national level to kind of play back some of those experiences, talk about the kind of injustice when someone has just made an honest mistake and yet is slapped with a penalty fare. You know, we've converted that and Transport Focus have converted that into some proposals, and the gist of it has been picked up by the regulator saying, look, there's got to be some way in which we can just recognise that mistakes get made, and people have got to be given a bit of space for that.
Let's move on to talk a bit more about accessibility and how we can ensure that transport is more accessible.
SPEAKER_10And accessibility, even in London, it still has a long way to go. So, you know, it's kind of depressing in that sense, but then the infrastructure's older in London than in many other places. So there's this real balancing to do.
SPEAKER_04And also, if you have one bad incident of falling over, it's more likely to happen again, and there are all these kind of knock-on effects. So it's really important that we kind of reduce as much as possible the risk of those happening.
SPEAKER_09It's really difficult to find one that's truly accessible, that can be used by someone with particular types of disability. They can be heavy, they can be poorly lit, uh, you know, it can be very difficult to get a wheelchair up to the place to actually disconnect them and plug it into your car. And, you know, we put out a pretty strong report saying this this wasn't acceptable.
SPEAKER_12Those people who kind of think about this for at least five minutes realize that actually if we make the system better for those people who may be mobility impaired, whether it's on a permanent basis or temporary, it actually makes the system better for all of us. Yeah. So I don't think that priority is going to go away anytime soon. If anything, it's going to be stronger. Some of it's expensive to deliver. Still a Victorian transport system in many parts of the capital, and kind of converting that to be truly accessible, really expensive, but rightly it feels like it's going to be a big priority.
SPEAKER_08A bit of a shout out
to Joanna Davidson, who's one of your predecessors. And I think she put her finger on something very important when she said, it may seem like a small thing, but the campaign to make toilets free to use in each of the mainline stations has been a massive benefit to huge numbers of people. So that's kind of a really brilliant example of an issue which has not been making national headlines, but makes travel just possible for everybody in a way that it's really necessary to do.
SPEAKER_04Knowing that there's a toilet somewhere means you're more likely to go to that place, be more active, spend money in the local shops, access services, etc.
SPEAKER_12Making sure that access to lose is free. And it's a reminder, it's a bit like politics. All politics is local, all transport at the end of the day is local. And the small stuff matters as well as the big stuff.
SPEAKER_04There's something like 140, 150 stations on the Transport of London network that have toilets.
SPEAKER_11Oh, I didn't know that. I wouldn't have thought it was that many.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and that's why I think that information is really important to get to people because you're right, most people say, I thought it would be much smaller than that. I don't see these toilets, I didn't know they were there. And actually, if people are more aware, because there is better communication, that can support people who are planning their journeys, for
instance.
SPEAKER_08In the next 25 years, what do you think the biggest changes uh that are going to shape our work over the next 25 are going to be?
SPEAKER_09Yeah, so one of the biggest things that's happening to us, and indeed the whole transport ecosystem in Britain, is the government's rail reform agenda. There's a bill going through Parliament at the moment, which is going to fundamentally change things. It's going to see the creation of an entity called GBR, so Great British Railways, which is essentially going to bring together most, not all, but most of the rail operators in Britain under one GBR nationalised entity. And that's going to be obviously a major change.
SPEAKER_12It was interesting actually when Andy Lord, the transport commissioner, came to our board meeting in the spring of this year and we asked him the same sort of question. And he was interested in the potential for AI to reduce the number of times that there are trespasses on the public transport network, which would have safety benefits, clearly, but it would also have benefits in terms of the reliability of the services.
SPEAKER_00There's lots of interesting discussions about how we can better use AI and bots to be able to kind of sift report in and come pick up patterns and be able to actually understand correlations and therefore how we can actually speed up some of the investigation process so that we continue to have that capacity and continue to be really victim-centred.
If you could change one thing to improve London's public transport system, what would it be?
SPEAKER_10I would try to have drivers given the same routes most of the time. So they get to know some of their passengers and people start to feel more bonded with the regular routes. Because I think it makes a big difference, including for the drivers, if they see familiar faces and friendly faces, and have a bit of a wave and a chat and whatever. It makes life easier for everyone.
SPEAKER_04Communication, because it's about supporting people planned journeys and have the information that they need, but also to prevent people from missing out from things that would actually benefit them.
SPEAKER_12I would have thought in this day and age we can progress from what we've got at the moment as like a family of concessions that TFL already offers, over 20 types of concessions, all sorts of cars, and actually use technology whereby each person's profile can determine the particular package of support they get. And I'd be really interested in looking at what we can do that way rather than just giving everyone a free ride.
Thank you very much for tuning in to this episode of Talking Transport.
SPEAKER_03And you can hear more about London Travel Watch on our website, sign up to our newsletter, and keep an eye out for our next podcast.
SPEAKER_08But for now, thank you very much for watching and listening. Goodbye. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_11Done? Are we done?
SPEAKER_12Just do this all day. Yeah, brilliant. All right. Thank you. Fantastic.
SPEAKER_05Do you remember is it Toy Story 2? Also at the end of the movie, Barbie's at the end. She's like, Bye-bye.
SPEAKER_02There you go. Toy Story Two crowd.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, loop the real.