Workshop with University of Leeds students

A Fleet for Change’s Lizzie presenting the workshop focus

Last Friday we welcomed 15 Masters students from the University of Leeds Transport Studies department to meet our team. The focus of the workshops was to discuss the potential impact of A Fleet for Change (and particularly the A Fleet for Safety project) and any barriers to success.

This was a fantastic opportunity for our passionate team to engage with some brilliant young brains who will be the future of transport across three disciplines: engineering, planning and sustainability. In turn, it was great to share how a grassroots company like ours, with big ambitions, can tackle safety issues, transport poverty, and access.

Leeds University Masters students participating in the workshop

The students, across all 3 disciplines, provided an impressive array of ideas in response to our prompts, including identifying financial constraints and government policy as major barriers to decarbonisation, experiences of violence and misogyny as a barrier to women travelling safety, and the visuals of night time travel (dark spaces, empty transport, long waits alone and outside, lack of visible surveillance and security staff) as detrimental to the perception of safe travel.

Needless to say, the students’ responses to our A Fleet for Safety project, and its goals of helping women and vulnerable people get home safe, whilst reducing emissions and improving the desirability of public transport use, were overwhelmingly positive, and we’re looking forward to some exciting collaborations on research projects in the future.