There Was An Idea, To Bring Together A Group of Remarkable People
Key Takeaways
- Transport systems around the world are falling short, and the pace of reform is far too slow.
- The barriers to transport reform are rarely technical; they are political, institutional, and human.
- A wealth of hard-won knowledge about transport reform exists, but much of it lives in people's heads rather than in any book or database.
- AI can take you some of the way up the hill, but it cannot replicate the depth of insight that comes from lived reform experience.
- What reformers need is a community, a place to find each other, learn from each other, and support each other.
- The Transport Reform Project is a global community for anyone who believes transport can and should be better, regardless of their role or background.
- The community will offer learning, practical tools, support and mentoring.
- The goal is to create a world in which reformers have the tools, knowledge, and support they need to transform transport.
- The community is being shaped right now, and your input will directly determine what it becomes.
What Next?
If you are interested in becoming part of the Transport Reform Project, please register your interest here.
Share this post with people you think will be interested. The online link is here.
Introduction
Most people who work in transport can point to a reform they know would make a real difference: a better bus network, safer streets for cycling, a fairer fare structure, but somehow, it never happens. The knowledge is there. The evidence is there. And yet the change isn't.
That gap between knowing what needs to happen and actually making it happen has been on my mind for a long time. Why is transport reform so hard to deliver? And what could I do that would make a meaningful difference to transport outcomes around the world, not just in one city, or one project, but at scale?
I've been turning those two questions over for years. Then, recently, the pieces started to fall into place.
This post is about what I've concluded and about an idea I'm working on that I believe could make a real difference. I'd love your help to shape it.
The Need for Reform
Transport shapes almost every aspect of our lives. Yet in most places around the world, our transport systems are falling short.
The challenges are well known. Public transport is too often slow, unreliable, or simply absent. Walking and cycling infrastructure remains an afterthought in most cities. Road safety statistics, despite decades of effort, are still deeply troubling. Disabled users and women continue to navigate systems that were not designed with them in mind.
We continue to over-invest in new and bigger roads, even as the evidence on induced demand tells us they make congestion worse, not better. Cars receive enormous direct and hidden subsidies while active and public transport fight for scraps. Assets are deteriorating while long-term funding remains unstable. And the transition to net zero is proceeding far too slowly.
What makes this especially frustrating is that this is not a knowledge problem. We know what good public transport looks like. We know how to build high-quality cycling infrastructure. We know how to design for accessibility.
The problem is not the βwhatβ. It is getting the change approved. That is the reform problem.
The Barriers To Quicker Progress
If the problem were simply a lack of knowledge, things would be getting better much faster. After all, there is no shortage of guidance and research on what good public transport looks like, how to build high-quality cycling infrastructure, how to design for accessibility, and how to manage ageing assets. The technical knowledge largely exists.
But transport reform doesn't stall because people don't know what to do. It stalls because of everything that has to happen before the technical work can begin, getting the right decision made by the right people at the right time and making it stick.
These barriers take many forms. Some are political: a public that still demands more roads, politicians who respond accordingly, and a widespread misunderstanding of induced demand that makes it hard to challenge the road-building consensus. Others are institutional: transport agencies that are slow to change, Treasury processes that favour short-term investments, and a persistent gap between academic research and actual policy decisions.
Then there are the people problems: vested interests that distort good decision-making, stakeholder resistance that derails well-designed proposals, and communication failures that allow sensible reforms to be misrepresented or misunderstood. And even when reforms do get approved, poor implementation can lead to reversals that set the cause back years.
Overcoming the Barriers
The good news is that transport reform does happen. Around the world, there are cities and regions that have transformed their bus networks, built cycling cultures from almost scratch, redesigned streets for people rather than cars, and shifted political consensus on transport in ways that once seemed impossible. These successes, and the many failed or stalled attempts we see, contain exactly the kind of knowledge that reformers everywhere need.
The challenge, as I see it, comes down to two things:
Pulling together that knowledge: the successes, the failures, and the hard-won lessons about how to overcome the barriers to change.
Putting it in the hands of reformers who can apply it in their own context, at the right moment, in the right way, with a high level of support.
You might think this sounds like a job for AI. Modern AI systems can synthesise vast amounts of published research and guidance almost instantly. Surely it is only a matter of time before AI solves the transport reform problem?
Not quite, and understanding why matters.
AI is genuinely useful for getting you most of the way up the hill. But it has two important limitations in a field like transport reform. First, it tends to average across everything that has been written, struggling to distinguish the merely adequate from the genuinely excellent. The difference between generic guidance and the insight of someone who has actually driven a difficult reform through a resistant institution is enormous, and AI cannot yet replicate it.
Second, and more fundamentally, much of the most valuable knowledge in transport reform is not written down anywhere. It lives in people's heads, in the experience of the professional who negotiated a difficult stakeholder process, the politician who salvaged a reform that was about to be reversed, the retiree who has seen three decades of what works and what doesn't for getting reform approved.
That knowledge is currently invisible to AI. But it doesn't have to be invisible to us.
A Community of Remarkable People
My answer to these barriers is a community: a global network of people who are united by a single conviction: that our transport systems need to change, and that they are going to help make that happen.
The vision is straightforward: a world in which reformers have the tools, knowledge and support they need to transform transport.
This community is for anyone who cares about transport reform and wants to do something about it. That includes:
Transport professionals in government agencies who can see what needs to change but need support to make it happen
Consultants who want to push clients towards better outcomes, not just deliver what they are asked for
Academics who want their research to move beyond journals and into real-world policy
Community advocates campaigning for safer streets, better buses, or more inclusive design
Politicians and their advisers who want to drive reform but need help navigating the barriers
Urban planners who understand that transport and land use cannot be solved in isolation
Transport students who are just starting out and want to be part of something that matters
Industry suppliers who can see the gap between what they are asked to provide and the potential of what is possible
Retired professionals who have a lifetime of hard-won knowledge and want to pass it on
People between roles who want to deepen their understanding of reform while preparing for what comes next
What binds all of these people together is not their job title or their specialism in transport; it is their belief that transport can and should be better, and their willingness to work towards that.
The Community Offer
A community is only as good as what it gives its members. My aim is to build something genuinely useful to people doing real reform work, not a passive content library, but an active, supportive space where members grow, connect, and get things done.
The offerings I am developing fall into a few broad areas:
Learning and knowledge
- Webinars and conversations with experienced reformers who have navigated the hardest challenges
- Case studies of reforms that succeeded and some that didn't, with honest analysis of why
- Frameworks, guides, and toolkits for understanding and tackling the barriers to change
- Courses for those who want to go deeper on specific aspects of transport reform
Practical support
- Workshops to help members work through the reform challenges they are actually facing
- Office hours: regular sessions offering direct support, inspiration, and a space to think out loud
- Working groups that collaborate on creating resources that the whole community can use
Community support
- Discussion forums where members can ask questions, share ideas, and learn from each other
- Networking events, both virtual and in-person, to build genuine relationships
- Mentoring, both giving and receiving, to connect experienced reformers with those earlier in their journey
One of the core challenges I am working through is how to make as much of this as possible available to as many people as possible, including students, activists, and those between roles, while maintaining a sustainable model that can fund the work over the long term. I do not have all the answers to that yet.
Which is exactly why I need your input.
What I am looking for
The community I have described is still taking shape, but to make it as effective as possible, I want to build it with you.
That starts with a simple ask.
If anything in this post has resonated, if you recognise yourself in the list of people this community is for, or if you have felt the frustration of trying to push a reform forward without the support you needed, I would love to hear from you.
Here is what I am asking you to do:
- Register your interest using the link below. This takes less than a minute and simply signals that you would like to be kept in the loop.
- Complete the short survey that I will send you. It covers what you would want from a community like this, a little about your background, and what kind of membership model would work for you. Your answers will directly shape what the community becomes.
- Share this post with anyone you think would be interested: a colleague, a classmate, a community advocate you know. The more diverse the voices we hear from at this stage, the better the community will be.
This is the beginning of something I believe can make a real difference to transport reform around the world. But it will only reach its potential if the right people are part of shaping it from the start.
If you are one of those people, I hope you will join me.
Register your interest in The Transport Reform Project hereβ