Episode 8 – Delivering integrated transport through leadership, accountability and choice with Vernon Everitt, Transport Commissioner, Greater Manchester Combined Authority
Epsiode intro
Our guest today, Vernon Everitt, Transport Commissioner for Greater Manchester Combined Authority, is tasked with advising on how to make integrated transport delivery happen in the Greater Manchester city region.
In the episode Vernon talks about:
his remit and role as Transport Commissioner at the Greater Manchester Combined Authority and his previous customer centric roles at Transport for London.
the importance of leadership and a single point of accountability to make integration happen and his optimism for the Metro Mayor city leadership model that is happening across the country
why integrated transport is ultimately about providing a high-quality service that gives passenger options and choice
the development of the Bee Network including its progress to date, the role of innovation, the proposed Liverpool - Manchester Railway (Northern Powerhouse Rail) and the future roadmap for the network
the role of an integrated transport in decarbonisation and how it is a key part of transitioning to a low carbon economy.
The Interchange Podcast is produced in association with Arcadis and interviews leading changemakers and thinkers about how we can make integrated transport infrastructure happen. This season’s discussions fall under 4 key themes: Place, Data and Digitisation, Energy and Environment.
The Interchange Podcast series is part of Interchange, which is a platform that culminates in a thought-provoking two-day major conference being held on 04/05 March 2025 at Manchester Central. Register for our newsletter so you’re notified when event registrations go live.
Vernon Everitt
With over 40 years’ experience across the finance, transport and technology sectors, Vernon is the Transport Commissioner for Greater Manchester. He advises Mayor Andy Burnham on the development of the Bee Network, a fully-integrated, London-style transport system for this growing three million strong city-region. From 2007 to January 2022 he was Managing Director for Customers, Communication and Technology at Transport for London and held a number of other senior jobs there. Vernon’s primary focus was on putting customers at the heart of transport strategy and operations, including how integration of services, city planning, technology and data can deliver better journeys. Vernon is a non-executive director of Transport for Wales, is senior advisor to the consultancy Teneo and chairs the National Grid ESO Technology Advisory Council as the generation and distribution of energy across the country is transformed.
Resources and Links
Greater Manchester Combined Authority
About Interchange UK
The Interchange Podcast series is part of Interchange, which culminates around a two-day major event about rethinking transport infrastructure taking place in Manchester on 4/5 March 2025. If you’d like to attend you can book your place here.
Transcript
Vernon Everitt 01:12
Ayo, thank you very much for inviting me. My name is Vernon Everitt. I'm the Transport Commissioner for Greater Manchester, which means that I advise the mayor here, the mayor here, Andy Burnham and the 10 leaders of the councils that go up to make the Combined Authority about all things connected with transport, particularly the deliver delivery of an integrated public transport and active travel network called the bee network,
Ayo Abbas 01:44
which is great, because, I mean this, this podcast is all about how we can make integrated transport happen. So actually, you are the ultimate guest, in a way, because you're trying to do it. So you can kind of enlighten us. So let's start from, I guess. What does integrated transport mean? I guess, to you as an individual, but also to the B network.
Vernon Everitt 02:03
Well, I guess it starts from the fact that transport is just central to the way in which we go about everything in our lives, whether that's getting to work, accessing school, education, opportunity, jobs, housing, it's an enabler of all of that. And transport is a core element in improving economic growth, productivity, and as I mentioned, access to all of those other things we want in life, jobs, housing and opportunity for all and all doing it in a in a more sustainable way. So I guess integration means looking at that from a customer perspective. So it's quite easy for us in this industry to talk in acronyms and moats and goodness knows what else. I think that the key thing is for us to present back to the people that we want to use us, and we want more people to use us a system which is easy to access, which is safe, frequent, reliable and affordable, and it just enables people to go about their lives. So that's the integration from from where I sit is looking at it from a customer's eyes. How do we make it simpler and a better option for people to use public transport and active travel rather than anything else?
Ayo Abbas 03:31
I love the part about better option. It's giving people choice, isn't it?
Vernon Everitt 03:35
It is about choices. It's not about brigading people or or anything like that. It's about offering those options and making them as easy as possible to access. So I was at Transport for London for getting on for 15 years. Yeah, I had a variety of roles there, but customers was always at the heart of it. And I was heavily involved, for example, in the London 2012 Olympics and making arrangements for the transport there with my colleagues, and that was really instructive, because we learned so much during that period, running up to and during the London 2012 Olympics, about travel demand, about communication, about the way in which you change services, and we took quite a lot of that into business as usual, if you like, in in the way in which the London transport system operates. So I suppose what I'm doing in Greater Manchester is taking some of those sort of magic ingredients that made London work and applying them in the context of Greater Manchester is Greater Manchester is one of the fastest growing regions of the country. It's nearly getting on for 3 million people, hundreds of 1000s of businesses growing at a rate of knots, and we've got to make public transport and active travel a more attractive option than just using the car, and we've got very ambitious motion targets. So at the moment, 60% of people use a vehicle for their journeys in our region, and we need to get that to more 50/50, a more balanced picture between that and using public transport and active travel. So I guess that's what I'm doing and trying to and it sounds so easy, doesn't it Yeah. So let's take buses as an example, I guess. Yeah, so, but buses everywhere outside London, were deregulated in in the mid 1980s and Greater Manchester through a very positive and brave step, actually, by the mayor and the leaders here, decided to take the buses back within the public authorities control. And that wasn't about control for control sake. It's so that we can actually integrate the bus network with what's already operated by the public authorities, which is the Metrolink Tram network here in Greater Manchester, it's the biggest light rail system in the country, 99 stops, over 100 kilometers of track. So, you know, we've really started to piece all of that together and integrate it so that the timetables and the services complement each other across those modes. And I guess, as we'll discuss in a minute, we want to take that on to trains as well, but we've franchised the buses in three goes, because to buy off, you really would be biting off more than you could chew if you tried to do it all at once. So September last year in the northwest of Manchester, we franchised the first bit, then in March this year the second bit. And what we've seen is, well, three things have gone up. Punctuality has increased very markedly, and across both of the first two tranches, we are above our 80% punctuality target, versus about 70% on what went before. So the service that was in place before the Bee network service was about 70% we're regularly over 80% punctuality now, and some days it's 90% so Punctuality is up. Ridership is up by 5% in the last six months. In the tranche one area, which is Wigan, Bolton and Leigh, for those that know, Greater Manchester, patronage has gone up by 5% and revenues up as well. Revenue is running ahead of forecast. And the other thing that we've discovered is that with franchising, the cost of running the bus service per kilometer is lower than before, because what you had, what you had previously is when a commercial operator withdrew a route you. There, there came massive pressure on the public authorities to plug that gap. And the cost of plugging that gap was pretty expensive, because you were paying operators to run what in
Ayo Abbas 10:11
their local got a community bus service and stuff like that. Is that what you mean? Or what would, how would you plug that kind of thing?
Vernon Everitt 10:17
Not, not just that? Well, there are some routes that commercial operators just decided were not economically viable, yeah, but as a as a public authority, you can't take that view, because what you've got to do is bring connectivity and the ability to travel to all men, all residents in your region. So that's one of the reasons why we've done it, so that we can actually franchise and specify the routes, specify the frequencies, specify the fares, and then work in partnership with the expert operators to actually get the service in, day in and day out in a reliable way. So, we've, we've done the first two all of the early signs is that it's a success and it's going to be a question of continuous improvement from now on. And as you mentioned, Ayo, we complete the job in January next year, when the south of Manchester's bus services come within the Bee Network as well. And then in March 2025 as well. We will switch on integrated tap and go ticketing, which integrates the Metrolink tram system with the buses. So it's an incredibly exciting period and but incidentally, none of it just going back to an earlier point. None of it is easy. And actually, when you're swapping out one set of operators and one set of busses and replacing them with new, modern vehicles and everything that goes with it. There are teething problems when you transition, but the job is to get a grip of those quickly get it settled down, and then start the process of continuous improvement. Which is, which is the period that we're in now, and I guess you've got three phases of it, so you're actually learning as you're going anyway. So you're pilot for the next phase, and all of that,
Vernon Everitt 12:11
Well, anything in London about a single bus fare is one pound 75 Yeah. In the rest of the country, it's no wonder people started to, you know, not use the bus service, and so fares plays an enormous part in this. And actually also in January next year, we'll introduce a hopper fare, which has been a very great, great success in London, whereby you can take as many bus journeys as you like within the first hour of tapping in to your first bus, and that's terrifically helpful for people that have to take more than one bus to get to work or school or whatever it happens to be. So, we've learned an enormous amount. We'll continue to learn, and now we're in the process of doing some more fundamental network wide reviews of those bus networks, alongside the local districts. So, the one, first one's kicked off, we can Bolton and Leigh where we're engaging with the local districts and the local communities to say, here's what we franchised, and it was basically the service that existed previously. But the question now is, how do we improve that? To meet local community needs and mould it for everyone's benefit, for businesses, for individuals and so on. So, I guess, what role does the private sector play in the kind of what's happened in terms of this integration and integrated delivery that you're tackling at the bee network? What. What role can they do?
Vernon Everitt 16:05
Yeah, well, we do try and bring new things to old problems. And one of the things that I'm most proud of in terms of my time at Transport for London is that we recognise the value of free, readily accessible, open data to other people, and we spent quite a bit of money to make our data digestible, put it into a nice API, make it consumable, be able to put it in the London data store, run by the the great London Authority that has data on things like health and education and so on. So we're able to put the transport data sets alongside everything else, and here in Greater Manchester, we're now starting to get our hands on high quality data for the bus service. We've always had it for the for Metrolink, the tram, the tram service, but we are now getting very rich flows of data on the buses, how people use them, where they get on, where they get off, how we can use that data to get insight into how the network might be developed. So that's a huge thing, and we will make that that when we get five minutes after introducing bus franchise and all the other things we will put that into the public domain in a in a way that people can consume it. The other areas where we have used digital technology is with traffic signaling. Now you can have the best buses, the best fares and all the rest of it, but if the traffic isn't flowing, journey times won't be reliable, and people won't use you. So, the experts here at transport for Greater Manchester, who operate all of the signaling across the across the across Greater Manchester, use digital technology to adjust traffic signaling to help keep the roads flowing. I mentioned the Bee Network app, which has got a load of fabulous facilities in it. You can buy tickets on it. You can see where your bus is. You can plan your journey. You can do all sorts of stuff on it. You can discreetly report if you're feeling uncomfortable on a journey, and it links you in directly to Greater Manchester Police and their live chat, their live chat facility. So, we're doing all of that, plus we're trying to, in this area, implement existing technologies which, in truth, should have been deployed here many years ago, such as tap on, tap off, ticketing,
Ayo Abbas 20:37
because that's all in existence, isn't it? It's just, I guess it's going to have somebody who champions it and pushes it across right? Completely. Yeah, completely.
Vernon Everitt 20:44
I mean, people that are used for the London system or have been in New York or Sydney, just know you tap in, tap off, you don't give it a second thought, and you know that you will automatically be charged the lowest fare for your journey. And we really need that everywhere outside of London. So the innovation isn't just about looking for new things, it's actually about implementing existing technologies that we know work and that we know will add to people's propensity to actually use us. The thing where I feel we need to do more is in the area of safety and security. We know that people feeling safe and secure, or, you know, perception that perhaps some of these environments aren't safe is a is a blocker. Going back to your earlier question about people using public transport and active travel, and we're determined to look at new ways, we've introduced more people on the ground so that there's more visibility of staff around our network. We have something called travel, safe support and enforcement officers that have been hugely successful in just being present of bus interchanges and on buses themselves to just to give people visible reassurance. But there's something for me about pushing the envelope a bit more on safety and security and and we're exploring different ways where we could push that envelope a
Ayo Abbas 22:10
And I guess just moving on to de carbonization and transport. How important is transport in the in terms of delivering a low carbon economy, it's
Vernon Everitt 22:20
absolutely fundamental. I mean, surface transport is one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gasses. And everybody now across the UK, I think, is now focused on decarbonizing their fleets. So if I take Metrolink, first of all that. So, the tram service, which is, as I mentioned, is the biggest one in the country that that runs off 100% renewable energy. Yeah, electricity, no, there's no tailpipe emissions. With the buses, the advent of franchising is enabling us to introduce literally hundreds of new zero emission vehicles. We've got 132 on the roads at the moment, there are many more to come as we complete the job of bus franchising, and our ambition is to have 50% of the fleet zero emission by 2027 and 100% zero emission by 2030 we're really pushing on that and that, again, an easy thing to say, but you have to do all sorts of things like make sure that bus depots can charge the vehicles so that you have, you know, you must have the main supply. You must have the capability within depots to charge vehicles. But we're on with all of that. So, this is another reason why, you know, we want to get from that 60/40, to 50/50, which it's because these are more carbon efficient ways of moving around. And given the population growth that we've got here, given the jobs growth that we've got here, that's absolutely central to making growth in this city region, sustainable.
Ayo Abbas 24:02
And in terms of Manchester, Greater Manchester, and making, I guess, placemaking, I mean, what how important is the transport network, integrated transport delivery, to making that happen
Vernon Everitt 24:13
again, it's absolutely central, if I if I think sometimes, I try and illustrate what good looks like by referring to Stockport bus interchange, which is which is in Greater Manchester, and as part of Stockport Council's huge regeneration of Stockport as a center of Stockport, there's been a brand new bus interchange created which links up the rail station, so the heavy rail station with bus services, with active travel facilities, walking and cycling and wheeling facilities. And if Dame Sarah story, my colleague, she's the active travel commissioner here in Greater Manchester, Dame Sarah would point to this as a, you know, as a great illustration of the way in which active travel is the glue between the first and last miles of people's journeys and the connections with buses, trams and trains. So, it's absolutely central to regeneration. If you just look around Stockport, there's a rooftop garden on top of the bus interchange. It's lovely and has come in really handy during this, during the during the warm weather, because we do have some
Ayo Abbas 25:28
rains in Manchester.
Vernon Everitt 25:32
Complete myth. It is so central. And if you look at plans in all around Greater Manchester, this isn't just about central Manchester, of course, this is about the 10 towns and cities that encircle the center of town. And if you go to Oldham, for example, huge plans in Oldham to regenerate the High Street and all the rest of it, and the transport contribution to place making just making things nicer and making walking and cycling routes better, it just all goes towards encouraging more people to sort of come into town and to switch to more active modes. So that place making thing is absolutely core to what it is that we're trying to do here.
Ayo Abbas 26:19
But I think what you said earlier about as well, about transport being an enabler, and unlocking and unlocking placemaking, which is basically what it does. I think, you know, King's Cross is probably the model for it, isn't it? If you saw, you know how that was on, how that whole kind of rail, rail regeneration, and doing the stations and everything else that brought so much investment, every time I go there, I'm always like, it's such a different place.
26:42
It's absolutely mind boggling. What's been achieved there. And if I think back, I grew up in London, Stratford was a pile of rubber tyres, yeah. Well, you know, I'm I was born just off the Roman Road in London, yeah. So
Ayo Abbas 26:58
yeah I grew up in Forest Gate down the road.
27:00
So I know, I know where you hail from, and you'll know as well as me, that just wasn't pleasant,
Ayo Abbas 27:06
was it? No, it wasn't. And people didn't know where it was.
27:09 Vernon Everitt
The Olympics Did, did change the game? What really changed the game was the creation of the mayoralty in the year 2000 Yeah. So the people that drafted the Greater London Act were just so incredibly far sighted in creating a framework whereby you created a Mayor, a single point political accountability for transport, many other things, and then required the Mayor to have not only a transport plan, but an economic plan And a spatial plan. And putting those three things together has absolutely revolution, revolutionised London, and that, that I think, is what is happening across the country now, where we're fine, where we're seeing the creation of Metro mayors, you know, being created across the country, pulling everything together, and being that single point of political accountability. And, you know, West Midlands, West Yorkshire, Liverpool City region, the North East Sheffield, you know, I could go on, but everything coming together now to provide the framework for improvements. And many improvements are being delivered already on the ground in those areas, but this is just enabling us to move a lot faster. So absolutely but I think that single point of political accountability, because the complaints only go to one place, has been absolutely fundamental in moving the dial here.
Ayo Abbas 28:40
Brilliant. And I'm going to take you forward now, so 2035 which actually isn't that far anymore, in terms of what would you see integrated transport looking like in Manchester by then?
Vernon Everitt 28:53
well, by running it in a way which is integrated with everything else, and we'll get more people to use this, and therefore, the revenues go up again. I make it sound very simple. It isn't. It's hard, it's hard work. It's hard graft, but it's not. It's by no means fanciful. This stuff is within touching distance of being delivered. And incidentally, the rail plans are backed by the rail industry themselves. The plan that's been put together has been put together by Northern by Transpennine Express, by Network Rail, by Greater British Railways, and we're talking to the department about it. So it's not something we've just dreamt up. It's actually a proposition made by the industry itself. Brilliant on that note, thank you so much for coming onto the show. Thank you very enjoyed it.
