I’d like to start with some thank yous.

To Karen McShane – a woman I’ve come to greatly admire in this past year – you’re an inspiration and have brought so much to your term as President – dedication, compassion and conviction. Thank you Karen.

To my Institution – for being prepared to put its faith in me for the year ahead. I intend to bring a healthy helping of constructive challenge but always with the interests in mind of our profession and the public benefit we are committed to deliver.

And to my employers – the University of the West of England and Mott MacDonald – and to my wife and family – for being willing to share the load and cut me some slack to do my very best to live up to the expectations of my role.

As you’ll see, my presentation covers my journeys; and importantly is a reminder that it’s the people in all our journeys who matter most.

I’d like to dedicate my inauguration to two of them who are no longer with us: Professor Richard Allsop, who represented the very best of transport studies; and Professor Martin Boddy, who brought thought leadership to urban studies and leadership with integrity to research and enterprise at UWE. I miss your wisdom and guidance. I miss you both.

So, let the journeys now begin.

First to my CIHT journey. It’s been a long one – I’ve been paying my subs for nearly a quarter of a century!

And there have been a whole series of milestones along the way. The year I joined, I spoke on transport futurology at the Presidential Conference. A few years later I supported David Tarrant with his Presidential theme on transport hindsight. I didn’t foresee that we were to become colleagues at Mott MacDonald later in my career, or fellow trustees of the Rees Jeffreys Road Fund. I had the honour of delivering the very first CIHT Learned Society Lecture; and got a second go 11 years later. Both sponsored, as it happens, by Mott MacDonald.

Alongside the punctuating events and honours have been roles I have played as part of the Institution – something so many of us do to help make this important professional community what it is.

Two undertakings I was very proud of are: (i) the CIHT FUTURES initiative (that explored uncertain futures and a new way of planning for them – deciding and providing instead of predicting and providing); and (ii) the 10-year review of the competencies expected of transport planning professionals. One led to the other and the need for constructive challenge in our sector was brought to the fore. I defined this as “a capacity and willingness to question the appropriateness or robustness of orthodox approaches, consider how they might be improved or how alternative approaches might (also) be introduced”. Constructive challenge is in my sights for the year ahead.

On now to my professional journey. Who knows where these journeys really begin or what early seeds of note are planted. In my case I chose Maths, Physics and French to study at A-Level. I vividly recall what some might call a STEM Ambassador trying to intervene – Dr Fox, the rather fearsome head of chemistry at my boys grammar school took me aside to explain how my future career prospects would be undermined by mixing arts into sciences.

Next step was the choice to undertake a thin-sandwich course in Civil Engineering at university in Cardiff. We’ll come back to the long hair later. During my course I spent six months with Balfour Beatty working on the Frome bypass construction as a setting out engineer. I then spent six months the following year with Ove Arup and Partners working on designs for by-pass schemes in Mid-Wales. We’ll come back to those too.

But on graduating I didn’t feel enough pull from either contracting or consulting in civil engineering. But I was starting to fall in love with transport. I stayed on to do a PhD in Cardiff, putting my computer programming skills to work to write a traffic simulation and to see if I could train artificial neural networks to drive a vehicle. It was only 25 years later that I realised I’d been in the vanguard of the field of autonomous vehicles and driverless cars!

Having then failed to sell my soul to the devil and work as a systems analyst in the financial sector, I realised that perhaps academia was beckoning as my professional home.

Professor Mike McDonald put his faith in me and I started work in the Transportation Research Group at Southampton University in 1994. Known for its international reputation in so-called Intelligent Transport Systems I homed in to what was to become one of my career specialisms – traveller information. This newfangled thing called the World Wide Web was just getting going. Meanwhile the iconic European Commission project ROMANSE – Road Management System for Europe – was providing information to drivers and public transport users in Southampton. I had the idea of making that information available on the web – and Mike and David Tarrant (then at Hampshire County Council) gave the green light to try and make it happen. A few years later, and a new Labour Government under Tony Blair decided it wanted to create the world’s first online national door-to-door multi-modal journey planner. With support again from Mike, I was seconded into DfT’s expert client team as Senior User to help make this happen.

But that French A level clearly symbolised something. While I was fascinated by the unfolding digital age and technological developments, I was increasingly motivated by the human dimension of transport. At 33 I became Professor of Transport and Society at UWE where I founded the Centre for Transport and Society. Over 20 years ago it was rather unusual to foreground the societal role of transport. We attracted social scientists and engineers alike and grew rapidly as a team.

In my inaugural lecture as a new professor I drew this cartoon picture, depicting what I hoped would be more change to come in transport studies – as a discipline rooted in engineering and economics, we were now entering sociology. In that lecture I set out what I still believe to be fundamental to how we frame our professional lives in this sector. Transport does not serve society (as it has seemed to me was a normalised view in the sector). It shapes society – just as society shapes transport. We need transport to support the sort of society we want.

From 2010-2017 I did a seven year stretch in senior management in the university – as Associate Dean for Research and Enterprise in my Faculty. My wonderful boss Professor Paul Olomolaiye PhD DEng FRSA gave me the latitude to continue my passion for transport studies alongside, including a secondment to the Te Manatū Waka – Ministry of Transport (New Zealand) which gave birth to Decide and Provide and Triple Access Planning – a new way of thinking about and doing transport planning.

But my love of transport won out. In 2017 I was growing frustrated by all the excitement in the transport sector around so-called ‘Smart Mobility’. During my PhD I had learnt of the word ‘anthropomorphism’ – bestowing technology with human-like qualities. It seemed the sector was yet again being seduced by the siren sound of technology and ignoring the human element in transport and society. The future was going to be defined by ACES – autonomous, connected, electric and shared.

I wondered if I could secure an industrially sponsored chair in future mobility to get back into the thick of it. As luck would have it, and (via an introduction from their Managing Director of Highways David Tarrant) Mott MacDonald was up for it. In making my pitch to them I convinced Paul Hammond , who was to become my first boss there and good friend, that my focus on the importance of access over only mobility was on message. So since 2018 I have been the Mott MacDonald Professor of Future Mobility – seconded for half my time into the world of consultancy. We now have an amazing team led by Annette Smith that is taking forward Decide and Provide and Triple Access Planning alongside offering futures and foresight expertise to our clients – in a world that now seems to sorely need it.

This is a promotional profile I was asked to provide early on in my role. It was a reminder to myself that there have been three enduring obsessions in my life – family, mobility, and heavy metal.

Over the last couple of years I’ve been heavily back in the world of highways. I had the great honour of being a member of the Wales Roads Review Panel. Having been a student engineer designing and building new roads, I found myself considering whether or not proposed new highway projects should go ahead.

On the eve of the Roads Review report coming out, the CIHT’s members’ magazine, Transportation Professional, published an article I had written called ‘Seeing the Road Ahead’. Deliciously they allowed me to be my authentic self in the photo shoot for the piece. Finally I could bring mobility and metal together in a very public way with my Highway to Hell AC/DC t-shirt. Sweet.

I’ve subsequently had the privilege within Motts of working with some leading lights in our highways business – notably Steve Ellis and Andrew Theobald – to explore the future of highways and ‘seeing the road ahead’. It has also been one of my career delight to become friends with the former big boss of roads at the Department for Transport – Professor Steve Gooding. We recently co-led an initiative called the Road Investment Scrutiny Panel.

Before the pandemic hit us and changed the world, we were trying to play a small part in changing the world. Paul Hammond had challenged me to turn my academic thinking on Decide and Provide and Triple Access Planning into something tangible for practitioners. So I developed ‘FUTURES’ – the Future Uncertainty Toolkit for Understanding and Responding to an Evolving Society’. Following the CIHT FUTURES initiative it was fitting that FUTURES was launched at the 2019 CIHT Learned Society Lecture where I spoke alongside two luminaries and other firm believers in FUTURES and indeed two very good friends now – Stephen Cragg and Lynn Basford.

Other believers were to follow, including another important friend I have made – Will Pedley who became Transport Planner of the Year in 2023 for his pioneering work to get Oxfordshire County Council to formally adopt Decide and Provide in place of Predict and Provide. Exciting times!

Doing what we’ve always done and getting what we’ve always got just wont cut it any more. We’ve just come to the end of what I hope will prove to have been an internationally important pan-European project on Triple Access Planning. And in the continued absence of updated guidance from the (former?) UK Government on local transport planning, perhaps our new Handbook for Practitioners is timely. It aims to help local authorities take a more vision-led approach to transport planning that is focused upon access instead of only mobility, and which recognises the importance of having access to things that are near to us or available online, that together lessen the need for carbon-hungry motorised travel.

Before I move on to my personal journey, I want to underline the people part of my professional journey. I realise looking back that I’ve had quite a few bosses. I’ve been very fortunate. All of them have ‘got’ me and given my professional ambitions and values the oxygen to breath and flourish. They’ve been and are mentors to me, offering countless pearls of wisdom, and in several cases I count them as my friends. One of my current bosses, Graeme Smith, reminded me that as a young lecturer at the University of Southampton I’d helped him with his undergraduate project, supervised by a certain Professor Mike McDonald. What goes around comes around.

I couldn’t pass by mention of my long association with Professor Phil Goodwin. It was Mike in the late 1990s during a spot of mentoring who asked me “Who do you aspire to be in your career?” It was easy to answer, “Phil Goodwin”. In 2002 when I was Chair of the Transport Planning Society I teamed up with Phil to lead an initiative that became known as the Professors Letter. 28 Professors wrote to the then Secretary of State for Transport, Alistair Darling, warning of unrealistic expectations in transport policy. I found myself starring in a Cloggs cartoon with Phil in Local Transport Today – top of the CV at that point (I got another shot at that later in my career too!). Thanks, incidentally, to Peter Stonham and Co. at Landor for considering me part of their extended family through my career. And to return to the matter of bosses – when Phil joined our research centre at UWE in January 2005 I became his boss!! I use the term loosely – I was nominally his line manager.

I’ve had the great privilege of running a series of online panel discussions with PTRC that began when the pandemic arrived. Our Fireside Chats have covered many topics and attracted thousands of attendees in total. I’ve made sure we always have gender balance on our panels and we’ve had wonderfully diverse conversations that have taught me a lot. So many wonderful humans out there. And I’ll return to some of their words of wisdom when I come to my presidential journey.

So now let’s get a bit more personal. My mum (who has spasmodic dysphonia affecting her speech) sends her apologies for not being here today but I know she is in spirit. I did, however, manage to get a short two-minute contribution from her. Remember that long hair on my university student card?

Click the image above to watch a two-minute video contribution from my mum who recalls her conversation with my old grammar school headmaster about being asked to be deputy head boy, on condition that I got my hair cut. My authentic self won out!

This is the Lyons clan. My amazing wife Susie on the right – long suffering when it comes to transport and climate change, heavy metal, and politics. Robin, Florrie, Millie, Rosie and George – my inspirations who make it all worthwhile and ensure there’s never a dull moment. Catt Lyons my fantastic daughter in law and Tom my son in law to be. And last, but not least, my first granddaughter Maple. She was doing the horns within weeks of being born!

Rosie, centre stage, has become a bit of a LinkedIn star with her occasional appearances on camera as Prime Minister for a day, addressing thorny issues such as racism and climate change. In March this year we took her, aged 12, to her first metal gig to see Uriah Heep, Saxon and Judas Priest. A wise metal head on little shoulders.

My great delight is that my eldest son Robin and I have found ourselves with overlapping territories in our professional lives. With an acting degree followed by an MSc in Environmental Governance, Robin – with Catt – runs a climate theatre company called Ergon and is a carbon literacy trainer. He expertly brings communication and performance skills together with knowledge of climate change and climate action. And he’s great in a mosh pit.

This is Maple. She’ll be 27 when we get to 2050. She epitomises why Wales is world leading with its Wellbeing of Future Generations Act and why we need climate action today with teeth.

So, to the last of my four journeys. The year ahead.

The first thing to say is that I look forward to seeing our Institution continue to thrive and to playing my part in this. Our membership is a broad church and we are respected for the open, inclusive and professional approach we take – last week’s CIHT Awards being a prime example.

The year ahead for CIHT as a whole will include more technical outputs including whitepapers, research projects and thought leadership articles, in-person (where relevant) events including roundtables and seminars, an enhanced role in influencing politicians and decision makers and a concerted effort to play back to the members more of what they want.

My Presidential theme follows proudly in the footsteps of Karen, and Neil Johnstone before her as President – I’m embracing the three main themes of our Institution – Climate action, Equality Diversity and Inclusion, and Professionalism. In particular, I want to emphasise the importance for all of us of authentically being sustainable, professional and inclusive.

Let’s begin with climate action. It’s relatively easy to declare emergencies, make pledges and set targets. But if we are facing an emergency, we really should – as 16 year old Greta said – act as if our house is on fire. Technologically tweaking business as usual isn’t going to cut it. The longer we drag our feet on collective action, the worse things are going to become. I am keen to better understand where CIHT members stand on climate action at both a personal and professional level.

If you take climate action, you are – in my book – a climate activist. Our Fireside Chat on climate activists highlighted how activism comes in lots of forms. Zoe Cohen and my former UWE colleague Dr Steve Melia have been arrested and taken to court for their public protest. Hiba Khan my colleague at Mott MacDonald has protested multiple times with Extinction Rebellion. Emma Woods gave up a career as a successful economist in the public sector because the economic growth mantra was suffocating her authentic self. Professor Greg Marsden held the Department for Transport’s feet to the Information Commissioner’s fire for its unwillingness to be transparent regarding its Transport Decarbonisation Plan. Robin entertains, engages and educates the public on climate change through his performing arts and environmental science fusion. They are all my climate heroes. I hope to find more CIHT heroes in the year ahead.

And I’m delighted to announce this evening CIHT’s launch of its new CIHT CLIMATES initiative, sponsored by Mott MacDonald. More news to follow but we will be engaging the membership through a series of one day workshops to explore what the future might have in store for our sector and for us as individual professionals and what that means for the actions we should be taking in the present.

What would I have if I ever had a tattoo? The point about equality, diversity and inclusion is that it goes further than only being skin deep. If we’re serious about what that phrase means then we have to embrace its complexity and work hard to play our parts in nurturing a more inclusive Institution and sector.

This may make some people feel uncomfortable, but I now understand that as a white, heterosexual, middle-class, non-disabled, neurotypical man I have enjoyed a life of privilege. With those characteristics I don’t represent the majority of the population, and yet the society I’m in seems designed to make passage easier for those with such characteristics.

One of the most inspiring Fireside Chats I organised was on women of colour in the transport sector. I learnt so much. And the importance of the stages of competence model became clear to me. I’m on my own learning journey and trying to continue to improve my own behaviours. In this model you may begin being unconsciously incompetent. In short, ignorant. This can move to being consciously incompetent about EDI. Being aware of your ignorance. You can then move to being consciously competent – making the effort to better address EDI as you understand the issues more and the lived experience of others. Such efforts could lead to instances of starting to be unconsciously competent. Good behaviours that are automatic. I want to hear where CIHT members feel they are on this journey and hear about how included they feel in a diverse membership organisation and sector.

Here are five inspirational women I had the privilege of encountering at the Construction Industry Council gathering last month. Amanda Clack who has written a book on managing diversity and inclusion put it beautifully – “inclusion means people feeling they can bring their whole selves to work every day”.

So, to professionalism. Here are two versions of me. Are they both professional? Would you trust one more than the other? Would you judge them differently? Which one is closer to my whole self do you suppose?

Some of you may have spotted me on LinkedIn. Some years ago I spoke to my UWE colleague Professor Alan Winfield who was acclaimed for his social media presence. I explained that in weighing up how to approach social media (Twitter at the time) I wasn’t sure which version of me to be – Glenn the Associate Dean at the time, Glenn the transport professor, or personal Glenn the metalhead. His answer was simple. “Be all of them”. And I’ve taken that advice. I try and bring my whole self to social media, I’d like to think I’m being my authentic self and offering the best of myself. I’m able to be constructively challenging and true to my values.

I ran a Fireside Chat on authenticity. I had these six inspiring and accomplished people on the panel. Yet they all bore scars from journeys through a world that has not been inclusive. One of Hannah Smart’s quotes has stuck with me ever since – “a comfort zone is a wonderful place but nothing ever grows there”. True professionalism is really challenging – to be true to ourselves and to be supportive of a diversity of others we need to remain self-aware, continuously curious and ready to constructively challenge.

As President I’m following in the footsteps of two past Presidents who have championed our Institutions themes and I hope I will be able to do the same. My constructive challenge for the year ahead is that I am hereby letting all event organisers know that while I will defer to their wishes, my request is that I be able to attend in a heavy metal t-shirt and jeans to talk authentically about our Institutions three themes. I’m serious. And no Manels. Diverse panels only please.

It can’t possibly happen in a single term of office but I hope that by authentically addressing together our Institution’s core themes we can play our part in making earth great again.