Simon Reed – Transport for London

“We’re responsible for keeping London moving.”

Transport for London (TfL) hauls six million passengers every day on their buses alone. That’s intense. And it makes Simon Reed’s job crucial to the mobility of Londoners.

Reed, Head of Technology and Data, Surface Transport at TfL, does a deep dive into congestion charging – its history, how it works in London, and how it helps fund TfL. He gives Paul an update on their contactless card system and lets us in on how and why TfL has gone completely cashless.

Like most places in the Western world, bus ridership is declining. Reed talks about the potential reasons for the decline, drawing correlations to new mobility options and how authorities aren’t matching the supply of resources against the demand from the people. 

He also expresses his ideas on the death of single-function smartphone applications and offers alternative solutions to provide transportation information through the apps your riders already use. Finally, he questions public transit’s role of being the mobility aggregators, suggesting that open-sourced data and third parties might offer better solutions.

If you want to know more about TfL, check out their website.

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