CEO Roundtable: Mobility at a Crossroads | Recorded Live @ InnoTrans, Berlin 2026

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Good afternoon. So welcome to the Mobility Redefined. So I am getting the same each time, same warning for myself that I need to make microphone closer to my mouth. Do you hear? Is it okay now?

So welcome to the Mobility Redefined CEO Live Roundtable taking place at InnoTran again this year. So, it's a big pleasure, to be back to InnoTrans because we have started Mobility Redefined two years ago, again this time at InnoTrans.

And during this two years period, we were lucky to host around 50 different CEOs, ministers, high level mobility decision makers in our podcast and our different roundtables. And today I have a great, panellists with me joining and they are coming from different countries from South America, Australia, and as well Central Europe and as well from the, south part of Europe.

Let me introduce my panellists to you one by one. on my left I have Fernanda Rudnick, who is a board director at Sao Paulos State Transport Regulatory Agency. Thank you Fernanda, for coming all the way and joining us today. And I have Mr. Manuel Valez Lopez, who is the CEO of, Metropolitan Transport Authority of Barcelona.

Manuel, thank you so much, for joining us for this afternoon. I have as well Cherie Lee, who is the Chief Engineering Officer at Yarra Trams from Melbourne, which is running the largest tram network in the world. and last but not least, we have Lex Bentner, who is head of public transport from City of Luxembourg.

So we have a 45 minutes of discussion covering where we are today in terms of governance funding and the hot topic around the fares. 'cause we have cities touching this topic a lot nowadays. In this panel, we will be talking about what they plan in terms of innovations for the future and their perspectives about what is waiting us for the next decade.

So if you are okay, let's, start our discussion.

And I wanna start with Fernanda, who's coming from Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Fernanda, because I was just talking to her before we start the conversation. And your organisation, your agency many years was mainly regulating the road transport. Now you are in charge of public transport, in particular metro and rail.

So what surprised you most about after this change, especially from the perspectives of economics and funding of public transport?

Okay, so thank you for the question. It's a pleasure to be here with all of you. So what surprised me most, it wasn't the technology. I would say that our metro system and rail system in Brazil.

It's pretty modern in terms of technology, what surprised me most it was the share scale of responsibility that comes with, regulating a mass transport, service. So in the, we have the private lines that are operated by private sector and these lines, they move around 3.3 billion, million people in a working day.

So that's a lot. And we were surprised how we have to be, safe flying and how, reli reliability is important. So that's the number that really stuck to me. And the thing is, from our side, like from the regulatory side, the market is still a little bit, constrained. I would say. We have only two operators for these lines and we are still wondering how to, open up the market to new players, especially international players.

And we have two models nowadays. We have some greenfield lines that is a really new line that is being construct under construction right now. 15 kilometre lines with 15 new stations. and the builder will build and operate the line and we have our brownfield lines where the new operators have to op, operate these lines with all the legacy that it comes with something that's running over their ear.

So we are still wondering which one, model is the best one to attract new operators and yeah, that's how we are dealing with.

Thank you so much. I think it's a good ice breaking opening, Fernanda.

And I would like to continue with Manuel with you. because nowadays there were a lot of discussions about cost coverage, Farebox coverage ratio of public transport, and I know Barcelona has made extensive use of discounted fares.

So are those discounts still achieving the outcomes you want? Or if you could redirect some of this funding, where will you be investing in?

Yes, it's really very important question because, in really, our region, the discounts are, were important in, in the moment of COVID, because the people was, out of the public transportation.

but with the pass of the time, it's difficult to reduce these subsidies. the people continues and the use of the public transport is increasing very high. So today we have 14% more, uses than five years ago.

Oh, it's a great achievement already

on yes, a great achievement in one way. The second, is that, these people don't come from the private cars.

So only one or 2% come from the use of private cars. So the people who is, maybe the policies of mobility helps to come here. We have in all the system, except one of them, record, historic record of uses. but the reality is that we spent around 250 millions a year for, increased these discounts.

Anyway, in, in our fare system, we have, one third of the ticketing, for social uses. and then we have the discounts and we have policies for young people. Young people until 16, don't pay public transport. Young people, until 30 years, pay 14 euros, a month for the first big zone of metropolitan area.

So we have a very good, fare system, but the, extra discounts are dangerous because we are putting the money in, increasing the use of public transport. But we need this money for the rolling stock. We need this money for the new investment, and we have to organise how to really discount, for people who have low incomes, but how to maintain the necessities of the rolling stock and the rest of infrastructure for, resolve the problem of the global system.

Your case reminds me the similar outcomes of experience of Talin in the past who was experiencing this maybe at the first stages some years ago, they saw around 6% of increase in the public transport ridership, but most of them were coming from walking and cycling.

But here in this discussion, we have a another opinion, another great example from Luxembourg because Luxembourg is the first country in the world that made public transport free of charge at the country level six years ago, if I'm not wrong.

wrong Lex. So Lex, During the six years, what has changed in practise after you first launched Free fare public transport in Luxembourg?

Well, first of all, free public transport makes it easy for everyone to access, the public transport. There's no reason not to access public transport anymore.

what has changed? For the customers, obviously they don't pay anymore. So for them it has changed maybe a lot, maybe not that much because in Luxembourg we have, well, we, the fares weren't that high at the beginning, so going from not very high fares to zero, to free private transport is not a huge step, I would say.

But still, I think for the customers, it's easy. You just get into a bus, get into the tram, get into the train. You don't have to think about what ticket to take, where the ticket to take. So it's easy for the customers to change from one mode to the other. That's the first one. from an operational point of view, it's, easier for bus drivers.

For example, who in the past had to sell tickets on the bus, we had quite long bus stops. So if you have 20 people who get into the bus and one pays for tickets, he takes maybe 30 seconds, 45 seconds could take as long as that this time is reduced to zero. So, operational wise, this is, very positive.

And then obviously there are also impacts on other things, like, for example, the ticketing system. We don't have the ticketing system anymore. So no hardware, no software, no back office, no discussions about financing anymore, et cetera. And while it's bad news for some of the companies here, but, it's for us a lot easier.

And obviously free credit transport is a very good publicity for the city of Luxembourg and also for the country.

I'm sure as a headline, if the public transport is developing, it's a good news for everyone, including the companies here.

And I would like to maybe to now give the last word in this section to Cherie, because also in Melbourne you have long time implementing free tram zone.

I had a great chance to experience this in the CBD of Melbourne in the past. And recently this year you implemented some period of free travel, and later you halve the prices and you are also the, the operator of the system. You are not the regulator taking decision and this has an impact on the operations, certainly.

And you are in charge of the engineering for Yarra Trams. So what does it make to maintain frequency and reliability of passengers that are expecting a good level of service when the fare policies are changing like this? And how is your now implementation in terms of keeping the assets, reliable and maintaining the service?

All right, thank you. There's a lot in that question. I'll try and unpack it first around the, fares. Yeah. Melbourne has got a free tram zone and we also, Victoria wide, we give free travel to anyone under the age of 18. So, it, we have been, have really flexible with our fares. there's been a fantastic new ticketing system introduced where we can pay with our credit cards, making it very simple to either buyer a Mikey card, which is our ticketing mode, or use credit cards.

And this type, this can work all over Victoria. So it's just a, it's a very simple, seamless way to be able to move around, with regard to our network. So, such a phenomenal network. We love it. We are the best in the world. We remind everyone at every opportunity. Now I've just been over to Warsaw for theEuropean tram driver championships. And of course we are not part of Europe, but we don't believe it. So we are like the Eurovision extra that they have along and we got soundly beaten by my friends here from Luxembourg and Barcelona. That's all right. but so what normally happens is with our network, we are 140 years old and we've got, some of our fleet, our w class heritage is a hundred and a hundred years old.

So thank you very much.

Sti So parties are important

on both accounts

and I think in this stunt, there will be party after, 5:00 PM as well today. That's what I can be adding there in the knowledge

that's what I wanna hear now I just wanna just, I think it's a good opportunity to touch on sort of three challenges that we find with this sort of mature ageing network, which that we are finding.

and one, sort of talks to your point about how do we manage their assets. It's a shift in mindset from say time and kilometre to condition-based monitoring has been a really,important move for us so that we can start to move towards sort of, degradation trends and leading indicators to really support how we manage our assets.

A second challenge is engineering knowledge. 'cause you know, very important when you're an engineer to talk about engineers. So, basically a lot of our assets are outliving the people who designed, commissioned and maintained them. People like to retire and some of our people, you know, they go and play in the big train set in the sky.

So it's really important that we transfer document and transfer that knowledge. and there's one other thing I'd like to mention as well is since we are here at InnoTrans, 'cause it's really kind of fundamental to why we are here, is supply chain. So in, in Australia we've been really kind of impacted by global events, in the Middle East issue.

and anything that we need to be shipped out of Europe has is obviously now very costly and it takes a lot of time. So that's really given us an opportunity to really explore better local markets. I've got my friends from Inva over there who do a fantastic job supplying us, with a lot of products.

And then also we are looking again to sort of Asia. So having some nice chats with our friends from CRRC and others. So it's around,trying to diversify that supply chain has been quite key. 'cause look, ultimately the customer doesn't really care if it's a new vehicle or an old vehicle, if it's shiny or not.

They just want something that's clean, safe, and reliable. And so, it's about making all our vehicles on the network, be able to operate in that way.

Thank you so much Cherie, and thank you also, as a user, time to time your system keeping the system very well working as Yarra Journeys,in, in Melbourne.

S

o let me continue with the second round of the discussion. We were more focusing around governance, funding, fares, and also some part its relations with the operations in the initial round. Now, Fernanda, you were talking around the concessions that you are having in Sao Paulo because you rely substantially on the private concessions in Sao Paulo.

Where do those contracts deliver well for passengers now, and where are the points that you might be focusing more to improve the current performance of this private concession contracts?

So this is something, we are always, thinking about. And where I think like the concession model generally delivers is capital mobilisation.

And that works for us in two manners. First, new lines and new sections. So I told you, we are building now a, a new line six, and we are also making, extension of line four that is 3.3 kilometres, two new stations. And that is being built now by the, by the concessionary. And we also, rely on them to revitalise our older lines.

We can invest in lines right now. And these lines, they really need urgently, renewable. So what is difficult, like the other side that make it hardest to work is that users, perspective. Because if we invest in existing lines in a short term, that will be friction. So we have to open up windows to the maintenance.

So far, the users in their way service has tends to go worse to go better. And that's something we are trying to work with the public.

Thank you. Thank you Fernanda. I always remember the rail system of Sao Paulo, in particular the metro system. In my mind always maybe the most secure metro system in the world with the lowest rate of, let's say, security related incidents, happening.

that was great. I was always giving in my former employee as a employer as an example on this one.

And let me to shift to the Barcelona, from Sao Paulo Manuel, you are, coordinating services delivered by different organisations as ATM and when passengers need one seamless journey, but responsibilities are divided.

Where can a metropolitan transport authority, like you play the significant role? And how do you see your, added value here on coordinating these actors?

Okay. So, I think this is the model of mobility. In the model of mobility, we have to change the mainly use of private cars for the multimodal system because the alternative, the only one alternative to the use of private cars for everything is the multimodal model.

So in this case, for the users, it have to be very single, frictionless, very simple. So the mission of the PTA is to coordinate all the actors, all the operators who have more than 70 operators in our system for putting a very single rules. For the users, how to use this multimodal system. So this is the key for the change of mentality of the users of let's provide all the system for the different situation I can have in my life.

So in our case,the, our PTA was created 30 years ago, so next year is our 30 anniversary.

Congratulations.

Thank you. Because of the integration of the fares, then we integrated the technologies for all the operators we're integrating, the different rules related to the, resilience of the system, respected to the criteria of different system respect to the users.

So finally we do it inside, our facade, all the coordination, in, in front of the user as have to perceive that it is very simple. It's very easy to use and they can use for the majority of their trips. This is the role, and this is the main force of these, PTAs when we have different actors in the scene, because the user have to feel that all the system from the beginning to the end.

We include here the first mile, the last mile. We include the different modes. We include how to use the technology for, integrate all the modes in front of the users. So everything have to be coordinated because the, the final user need a compact system itself.

Thank you so much. Manuel, maybe I can add one perspective here.

When we look at the most successful cities in terms of sustainable transport, and sometimes I'm talking to the leaders coming from these cities and what I see there, their success is not linked to do one single element of having, let's say electric buses fully or autonomous taxis or flying cars. That's not this.

The starting point is having the right governance and clear regulatory framework. I guess that's what you are underlining.

I totally agree. I think these are pieces of system, but the main goal is how the users can move, can do their trips using mainly the global system of inter mobility and not exactly every day with a private car.

Thank you so much Manuel Lex.

Let's continue our discussion where we left, because we talk about, free, fare public transport with you, but I know also that you are putting a lot of effort for decarbonization of your bus fleet with your operator, AVL. And I wonder, what you have learned about the effects on cost maintenance, site reliability so far with your experience and what could be your suggestions to the other operators listening us today in this panel?

from key takeaways from your experience there, from this decarbonization.

We had our first electric bus in, service at now. all our fleet is, fully electrified. we get, we still get some more electric buses by the end of the year, but by the end of the year we have, we have, switched on our entire fleet, our fleet at our subcontractors fleet to fully electric buses.

So we do have an experience almost now of 10 years. so it's not only buying electric buses, it's also how do you set up a network that could potentially work, even if there is a charging station not working at the depot. So we decided to be resilient and to have a redundant system to put some opportunity charging stations,outside on our grid and to have also a charging station at our depot.

So if a charging station doesn't work, doesn't matter, we have enough charging stations in order to keep the, the operations, up.there are a lot of things that had to be changed because electric buses, their capacity is in kilometre wise, the distance capacity is lower than diesel buses.

So this is something that needs, to be considered when doing the planification of the network. this is something new to us. Obviously, workshop maintenance had to switch from pure diesel to electric buses. so this is also something new. we didn't know how long we could operate electric buses at the beginning.

we were told, well, batteries, they will only last under the guarantee for eight years. Now we see our buses that have already six, seven years. they last a lot longer than eight years, which is a good thing for the total cost. So we expect them to, operate them at least 12 years.

So that's four years more. that's 50% longer than expected. So this is, this is good news. so I think you ask what is,suggestions for anyone who is thinking of switching to fully electric. A fully electric network is probably go around, talk to the different cities because there is no city.

1, 1, 1 solution for one city could be good for the city only, but for another city it doesn't work. So I would suggest to talk to the different, PTAs, to the different PTOs. Also talk to the different, suppliers of the buses. And, what is also very important, it's also, it comes also with some software softwares.

You need some softwares to operate these electric buses. So do also talk to the companies that provide the right software. You need to charge the buses. You need to charge the buses at night. if you have a restricted number of charging stations, then you need a clever software that tells you what time to put what quantity of energy in what bus.

And this you cannot do if you have a large amount, of buses on your own. You need software. So go around, talk to the people who have, experience, and I'm sure you'll find,your solutions.

T

hank you Lex Cherie. so we continue with you because in the earlier discussion you were giving an example and you were talking briefly about condition-based, maintenance condition monitoring.

And can you a little bit tell us where is condition monitoring making the real difference in the operations? And maybe you can talk a bit more about what, how digitalization is helping you to keep your, ageing assets up for the service.

Yep. Yes, for sure. Thank you. Thanks for the question. thanks for the engineering based questions as well.

Very appreciative. You can tell I'm the engineer 'cause I've got all my notes and you guys are just doing it off the cuff, so well done. yeah, so, predictive maintenance is one of those topics that's very,it's very kind of quite hot at the moment. There's a lot of,stands here and offering a lot of like sensors and, remote condition monitoring and ways to collect data.

So, in some ways, just in terms of when you look at a business and how you're gonna implement that, the technology is somewhat the easy part. The challenging part is having the business implement it so that we can actually get some useful actions out of that technology. So it almost requires two projects side by side,the technology that you wanna bring in for your remote condition monitoring, whether it be your panda graph, your wheels, your infrastructure, and also the part about how you're actually gonna use that data and how you're gonna make value out of that data.

So I'll just give a bit of an example to kind of ground this and I might overshare, so, occasionally it happens. So, Yarra Journey Makers is a,the franchisee,department of transform planning run a very successful franchise programme in Melbourne, Australia for trams and trains. And, we get to run the network for nine years.

And if we are good, maybe a few more. so we are backed by Transdev and John Holland and I think we've been in there 20 months now. So we are investing heavily at the start of the franchise into a lot of this new technology.when we arrived, we actually realised that there are already, two, wheel condition remote monitoring equipment on the track.

And that information goes into a, a, a black box, which is very difficult to mine and get information out of. So we're in the process of upgrading that as well and we are asking ourselves a question. What are we gonna do with this data? What data do we need to drive decisions? And then we are looking back and going, what data we are collecting, because I think we all fall into that trap where we, let's collect a lot of data, but we don't do anything meaningful with it.

And I'm quite comfortable sort of oversharing because I know that's a massive opportunity for virtually every network. So it's about what do we do with the data, what data's available and how are we making it really useful?I think there was a part of that question which wanted to talk about, where we get the real value out of remote condition monitoring.

okay, so this is a very simple answer. The value is,if you do that, if you ask the right questions, you get exceptional value. Anytime you look at,data driven decisions that save on consumables, rotables, and also anything that improves fleet availability, it's money well spent

and it's very essential for the cost of service and as well for the passenger, service quality.

Thank you so much for everyone for this two round of questions now.

we are coming to the end and I would like to ask one question, the same question for everyone. And the question is about the future. looking to the 10 years ahead from now, what is one change your network or your organisation must achieve as per you as a priority?

Let's start with you again, Fernando, for this round.

Okay. So. Success for our network? I would say it would come down to three things. First of all, technology and real interoperability between the lines. We are right now implementing ETCS a system that you all know very Well, here in Europe, it'll be the first time that we will implement ETCS in Sao Paulo.

And why we are doing that, two things. We expect to reduce the headway so we can offer more service to the users. But we are also, betting on interoperability between the lines. So second, we are really, willing to change users' behaviour. In Brazil. We don't have regional trains. We have only train in the city of Sao Paulo.

And we have now this inter city project, the first one that will connect, Campinas, which is a city that stays like 140 kilometres away from Sao Paulo with middle speed train. And we really hope that we'll take people out of the car and out of the highways. And third thing is, comfort and convenience for the user.

And here, real fare integration, we don't have that yet. So we are, willing also to have account-based ticketing where the system recognise passengers and not only one or two cards,

Manuel.

So, I think the main goal is to finish the work we are doing now. Okay. the goal in 10 years is how to facilitate to the users, to the citizens, the use of the multimodal system for the mobility.

So all that we're doing now to increase the participation of the young people, increase the culture of the multimodality, increase the reduction of the use of the private cars in the main trips, in the situation of a centre of a city, of the,suburban services of the services outside the centres.

So we have to find all the, the things we can put together for offering the people a very single system. And today, increase the use every day for, really can satisfy the necessity of the global displacement in a new mode, not in the actual one.

Thank you Manuel.

Cherie

So you can talk through the dinner.

So that means ticketing seamless, one ticket does it all. They're gonna need to have a single source of truth. and a really interesting thing flows outta that because if we are trying to get people into public transport and away from cars, then that whole system is as strong as its weakest link.

And from a sustainability point of view, it needs to be both environmentally and financially very sustainable. Everyone here in public transport understands our financial pressures. And so it's all about ringing out the, as much as we can from all our, all our assets.

Thank you, Cherie, Lex.

so, I guess there's still gonna be a lot of technological, developments and we probably, want, want to embark them, on our journey. But our priority is, customer satisfaction. So today, one of the, I would say the problems that we still have is we cannot guarantee the customer that they really arrive on time when compared to the timetable.

So what we are trying to do just now is, well, first of all, digitalize everything. So communication, fully digitalized. So we take off all papers, everything is gonna be digitalized. Even the small bus stops in the city, they will be, they will have e papers. So, customers, they will have their information of the incoming bus on real time.

So this one thing, but we also, have started the project with the University of Luxembourg, which is, based on machine learning. So we want to know what the day of tomorrow looks like based on our experience in order to communicate this to our clearance today. So we want to tell our customers today, how they should use public transport tomorrow in order to guarantee that they are on time.

Thank you so much, Lex.

I think we had a great discussion in a half an hour. We delivered this great discussion and there were various topics were covered. We talk about the governance side, we talk about the funding fares, especially, it's a very important topic nowadays. We touch to do innovative projects. the transition that's happening in terms of the decarbonization or from the concession side, the transformation in terms of the business models.

What I see, as a summary is that now, I mean my take key takeaways, maybe in the future we will be less focusing on the term of mobility, but more on the access. That's what I am, I'm seeing here and I'm seeing from you, the governance is being treated as a new infrastructure, as the new infrastructure for the future.

And whatever we do in terms of integration, in terms of governance, in terms of funding, everything is at the end measured by the service experience of passengers. So these are my key takeaways and I would like to thank to our, panellists, great panellists joining us, for this afternoon, for this, great discussion.

And as well, I wanna thank to our audience. I see a very big crowd, joining us, for this afternoon. And before we conclude, I would like to invite, Bill Delaney, the CEO of, Modaxo for his, closing words, who is hosting Mobility Redefined, CEO Roundtable this afternoon at InnoTrans.

thank you very much Kaan, and thank you to all the panellists, for a really great discussion.

you asked everybody about their plans in 10 years time, so I'd like to briefly share ours. so it's great that we're doing Mobility Redefined here in the Modaxo Neighbourhood,at inter Trans 26, right now, the Modaxo family of businesses, we touch about 700 million journeys every day, around the world.

So thank you very much.

Thank you for listening to Mobility Redefined brought to you by Modaxo. For more insights, visit our website at Mobility Redefined. com or follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite app to stay updated with our latest episodes. Thank you for tuning in and we hope you enjoyed the conversation.