3 takeaways from VRT Conference – Paris September 2021
It was great to attend the Ville Rails & Transport (VRT) conference in sunny Paris last Thursday. This conference hosted in Espace St Martin covered a debate discussing the new entrants to French railway and followed by an awards ceremony rewarding transport best practice in the past year. This was...
5 Ferries – September 2021
Almost 2 years ago, we tackled the 5 Ferries, an informal cycle route that involves island hopping on the West Coast of Scotland using 5 ferries with some stunning scenery. Read below for a summary of our 2021 cycle. What is the 5 ferries? A 72.5 mile circular cycle route...
Social Value for public transport companies
Another month, another blog post on social value along with suggestions of how public transport companies can maximise social value. For a copy of the infographic please download it from here. What is Social Value? The Social Value Act (PPN 06/20) came into force on 1st January 2021, overshadowed by...
Social Value – The opportunity to do more
You would have been forgiven for missing the Procurement Policy Note (PPN) 06/20 – taking account of social value in the award of central government contracts. This notice was released in September 2020 and came into effect on 1st January 2021. Unfortunately, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and Brexit meant that...
When is graffiti art?
When is graffiti art? An answer might be when the artist is one of Time Magazine's People of the Year as Banksy probably the world's most famous grafitti artist. Having worked on several projects to manage graffiti in the transport sector including costing up graffiti removal which is more expensive than...
Expo 2020 – Sustainability Pavilion Preview
Ever since I first arrived in Dubai in 2017, I heard a lot of about Expo 2020, the biannual world fair taking place in Dubai in 2020. Unfortunately due to COVID it is now happening October 2021 to March 2022 but the name remains the same! Therefore, I was delighted to get...
Jedi Polar Bear – A cold water swimming challenge
As an incentive to keep swimming over the winter I recently signed up the complete the Jedi Polar Bear Challenge along with my mother. This challenge is part of the Polar Bear challenge, a fantastic initiative from a Plymouth based cold water swimmer known as Mama Bear which runs annually...
Canary Wharf Festival of Light encourages walking
Great to see the #canarywharf Art Festival on a recent government sanctioned trip to the osteopath. It definitely brightened up the winter evening and encouraged me to walk around Canary Wharf. It is worth a look if you are in the area as it is one of the few attractions that is...
Dubai Design Festival
After a year full of COVID-19, lockdowns and innumerable video calls, I was delighted to attend the Dubai Design Festival while on a business trip to Dubai. In terms of COVID-19 precautions, everyone wore masks, security staff temperature checked people’s wrists to enter indoor areas along with limits of maximum...
Swimming 2 channels in 2 months – West Lothian Chamber of Commerce webinar
It was great to be asked to present to West Lothian Chamber of Commerce on 25th August via webinar summarising the lessons learnt from swimming 2 channels in 2 months in 2017. As part of Team MAD (which stood for mother and daughter and also a description of the challenge),...