Monocle’s editorial director Tyler Brûlé is joined by the CEO of Siemens Mobility, Michael Peter, to discuss our changing relationship with rail travel and the future of the urban commuter. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The working day has been transformed in many parts of the world.
Our relationship with rail travel and the future of the urban commuter is undergoing a dramatic shift.
My guest today is a man who's shaping the daily commuter experience and driving the digitization of travel across our cities.
Michael Pater is CEO of Siemens Mobility and he spoke to me from Berlin to offer us insight on how our public travel transport networks are making moves forward.
I'm Tyler Brulee in Zurich and this is the Chiefs.
Michael, thanks very much for joining us.
I wanted to maybe start with a big question for our listeners who might be sitting in North America or they're in Europe or they're in a major Asian city.
When you look at the urban environment today and people heading out their front doors, hopefully going to an office, going to work, going to the airport, what are the major issues confronting the urban commuter today?
Well, I think it's very much around that everybody leaves the office or whatever at the same time and traffic jams or the trains are packed for one hour a day.
But we're really not using our system very efficiently.
And combining that with the fact that actually we make little to no use of information available when planning our trips or even planning the transportation systems.
We, we run the trains as if we didn't know and many times we don't know what the usage will be, all of that leads to quite inefficient system and a loss of time.
And I know very few people who like traffic who have a happy experience when they come commuting, either in the car or also in the train.
So of course there are many things that go beyond what Siemens Mobility can deal with because of course you can't really impact.
You might be able to advise on what a new working day looks like.
And maybe we could argue that there is a new type of working day in many parts of the world.
But maybe let's go back to that commuter looking out across the city, across the street, when people think about what you do, what Siemens Mobility has to do and deliver, they probably are thinking about the threshold of a train where they look down and they see on the no slip.
Great.
They see the Siemens brand name there.
But if you look beyond, where else are you touching the life of a commuter every day?