Leon Daniels

Taking Steps
1 2 3 4 5 6
The Taking Steps editorial team visited
the London Transport Museum to
interview Leon Daniels. Leon is the
Managing Director of Surface Transport
at Transport for London.
What do you love
ONE most about your job?
I get to do loads of different things,
I was really looking forward to joining you this
morning because people like me learn huge amounts
from people who are interested, who want to make
changes, and who want to make things better
for the public.
Tonight for example I’m going to meet the President
of China at a dinner at the Guildhall. So what is
fabulous about this job is that every day is different.
There aren’t many jobs in the world where you get
to do such a variety of things. Sometimes I tell my
own children about my diary and they get tired just
listening to it!
What are the biggest frustrations in
TWO
your job?
The biggest frustration is that young people
like you and the people I work with are full of great
ideas and things we’d really like to do really quickly
because it would make life better, but in the world
in which we live firstly all the money we have comes
from the passengers who pay fares, and from the
taxes that are paid by your mums and dads in their
jobs, so we’ve got public money. Whilst there are
loads of things we’d love to do we can only afford to
do them at a particular rate because we haven’t got
an unlimited amount of money.
If we just take at the moment we are building across
London lots of dedicated cycle tracks, cycle super
highways we call them, that means that cyclists will
be in their own lane away from the traffic in order to
be able to cycle safely and to encourage more people
to cycle. However, there are some people who drive
their cars and others who have got deliveries to
make and so on, who rather wish we weren’t doing
that because its making life harder for them. So we
know in our hearts that it’s the right thing to do but
in order to get these things done we have to deal
with some people and some concerns about whether
this is the right thing to do or not.
Leon D
How many staff do you have in your
THREE work team?
I’ve got three and a half thousand people
working for me in Surface Transport and TfL plus
inside the whole of TfL we have 30,000 people and
on top of that we have all the bus drivers of which
there are about 25,000 who don’t work for us but
they work for the bus companies who work for us.
Then we have what I’d call our extended family so
they’re not people who work for me exactly but
the bus drivers, the engineers, and the cleaners who
work for the bus companies, there are people who
work in other companies that do things for us.
So the guys you see outside now digging the roads
work for companies who work for us and I think of
those as our extended TfL family because its really
important to remember that all those people out
there now digging the roads and the people you see
driving the buses, the people you see working behind
the counters (serving staff), the people checking
tickets, all these things, every one of those people,
rely on us for their jobs.
Almost 60% of the London Underground is actually above the ground and not underground.