Andy has seen a radically different future for rural public transport in west Wales. Sharon has glimpsed a greener future for live music in Bristol. Two very different conundrums, cracked by rethinking how things have always been done: tough nuts, clever answers.

A bus service that bends around your life

I’ve seen the future of public transport. And it’s very, very good. 

You can see it too. Imagine a traditional transport route. It runs like a ribbon through a city or landscape, to and from a set number of places. Sometimes the ribbon forms a circle with itself, but mostly it’s linear. Now and again it connects with another, but not often enough. You can extend your journey along the ribbon very easily, though not sideways. And then there’s the frequency. Perhaps it runs every 10 minutes, or on the hour. If you live rurally, that might be every 3 hours, or even 3 times in a week. You do what you can to shape your life to the limits of the service. Or you drive.

Take that whole idea, scrunch it up, and throw it in your mental waste paper bin. 

Widen your thinking

Instead of a ribbon, think of a cloth draped over an entire landscape. There’s a repeating pattern — daisies — woven into its fabric. Each daisy is a little point of attraction. And buzzing over the cloth, drawn from daisy to daisy in seemingly random movement, is a small swarm of very energetic bumblebees. 

A daisy is a place you’d like to visit, for its own sake or because it enables something bigger. It might attract you because it opens up an experience, an opportunity, or an adventure. A daisy isn’t the end of anything, but the start of lots of things. A hiking trail or cycle path. A new job. The beginning of a fresh perspective, seen from a different vantage point. Or simply a hopping on/off point for a more linear, traditional public transport route. On this cloth, there are lots and lots of daisies. 

A fable, or a blueprint?

In your mind’s eye, keep observing our bees being drawn from daisy to daisy. They can choose to move in any direction as long as it threads another daisy on the chain. And you’re beginning to see patterns emerge; the bees are making journeys. You’re not sure how a bee chooses its next flower — who knows what drives the hive mind of social insects — but their movement isn’t random at all. Some daisies are visited frequently, by multiple bees; some are visited occasionally. By-the-by, every daisy on the cloth gets its visit. No two journeys look identical. Nowhere is unreachable. 

I’m hoping this is starting to feel less like a fable and a lot like a brilliant model for a new kind of transport service. 

Now, squint a bit

If you squint a bit, our bees could start to look like small, smart, accessible buses. The hive mind — that’s an algorithm; the queen bee in our tale. It might have trained on historical data, but now it’s acting on users’ real-time wants and needs: the journeys being requested by the people who want to use the service. That’s how a bee/bus chooses from multiple adjacent daisies/stops. The daisies are trad bus stops, small village carparks, laybys next to quiet roadsides, red phone boxes with their defibrillator/bookshare/local info board, bus and rail stations, and any other useful or attractive place where it happens to be easy and convenient to get on or off a bus. 

Too good to be true? 

Meet fflecsi

No, because it exists. It’s called “fflecsi” — it may have other names in other places — and I’ve ridden it. In my case, over a cloth of many colours that embraces all of northern Pembrokeshire and southern Ceredigion, from the Preseli mountains to the sea. Built and orchestrated by the publicly-owned Transport for Wales, and operated by local company Richards Brothers, your relationship with fflecsi starts with your phone. Anyone that’s used a ride share app will be instantly at home there. 

You search the places you want to travel between, and when you would like to leave or arrive by. The app shows you some choices of ride, with details of your pick-up and drop-off points, and a price. Select your ride, payment is taken in-app or on the bus. (You can also book through a call centre.)

I searched for a ride between a very sleepy little village and a busy seaside town, aiming to arrive at 11:00am. There was a choice of three. Bear in mind that routes are being calculated and updated dynamically and as I’d chosen to ‘fix’ my arrive-by time, my pick-up was a time window, not a moment. It started 20 minutes wide (10:20 — 10:40), and then helpfully narrowed to 10 minutes with an update text very early on my travel day. Soon enough, tracking moved to real-time in the app. I watched as my ride approached on the map, and then materialised in front of me, comfortably in its window. 

The app is designed to be simple and confidence-building: and it works brilliantly.

Uber under

Here’s what’s different from the Uber experience. First, this ride included a mix of people sharing common segments of different journeys. There was a lot of conversation, orchestrated by an amazing driver. Most Ubers are basically streamlined cab journeys from point to point. Secondly, there is genuine social value — locals with lives to lead, sharing with visitors with time to burn, driven by someone working regulated hours with a predictable salary and benefits. Lastly it’s very affordable: my 20 minute journey cost £2.65, and people of pension age travel for free. And yes, it got there bang on time. 

Now we’ve all seen the future of public transport. Flexible, reliable and affordable. Something that shapes itself to your life.

That’s better than good. It’s amazing.

A festival that treads more lightly

It’s been a summer of festivals in the UK. Our appetite for live music, cultural events and connection is growing, with open-air events drawing thousands of people to city parks, remote countryside locations and large public spaces.

There are festivals for every age and interest. From the literary delights of Hay-on-Wye to the coming-of-age ritual and debauchery of Reading Festival, every weekend between May and September sees temporary stages, marquees, tents, food outlets, toilets and countless other structures put up and taken down again across the UK.

Waste not, why not?

The environmental cost can be huge. There’s the electricity and water needed to power stages and services, travel to and from the venue, and all the waste generated by feeding thousands of people from temporary pop-up outlets. Lowering the environmental impact of these events is a tough nut to crack.

Enter FORWARDS Festival in Bristol: an event powered entirely by clean energy, but which still does all the great things festivals do — music, community, spectacle, joy and togetherness — without the same drain on resources.

Zero-emissons events

The idea of creating a zero-emissions event has been around for a while. Massive Attack’s event on the Downs in 2024 set a world record for the lowest carbon emissions ever produced by a gig. Their hope was that it would begin systemic change, and that ambition is now being realised in their home city of Bristol.

This year, the International Balloon Fiesta and Love Saves the Day successfully used green technology instead of diesel generators. FORWARDS pushed things further last weekend, with every stage powered by renewable energy. The aim was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris Agreement and improve air quality for people living near the festival site.

Behind it is the Clean Power Pilot, inspired by Massive Attack’s record-breaking event. It brings together the West of England Mayoral Combined Authority, Bristol City Council, the UN and C40-affiliated ACT 1.5 project, alongside several clean-power providers. Together, they’re working to power festivals, cultural events and film and television productions across the region with 100% renewable electricity.

Tough nuts, clever answers

It also fits with FORWARDS’ wider belief that a festival can do more: that music, connection and debate can help drive change and build a better future for the city, the industry and its communities.

As a punter, you wouldn’t necessarily have realised that all this work was happening behind the scenes. I certainly didn’t; I’ve had to look it up to write this.

What I did notice was that the festival was really well organised. There wasn’t too much queuing, the food was great, with plenty of plant-based options, and getting to and from the site was easy.

And the music was brilliant. Saturday marked the final performance of Self Esteem’s A Complicated Woman tour, and it was fabulous: emotional, joyful and cathartic. Just what you want from a festival experience — except, perhaps, with a little less environmental guilt.