Our Managing Director & Head of Consulting, Simon Lusby, talks about how he arrived at City Science two weeks before lockdown (and the impact that it had on culture and team building), his passion for sustainable transport, and his track record of running marathons (10 so far)…
What is your position at City Science?
I started as a Technical Director & Head of Transport, then Head of Transport & Sustainability.
Although titles can be a bit arbitrary, my title is now Managing Director & Head of Consulting. I think it explains what I do fairly well, as I have three elements to my role:
- A company-wide direction role, ensuring we have corporate principles, policies and processes in place that support our staff and align to our mission. As an Ally, I endeavour to use this opportunity to embed diversity and inclusion wherever I can.
- A leadership function horizontally across all consultancy – including managing the team leaders, overseeing the strategy, leading our strategic pursuits, ensuring projects are effectively resourced, staff are highly-motivated and making sure we deliver valuable outcomes to clients.
- A technical specialism vertically across everything transport, on some projects even getting the whole way back to my roots as a transport planner or modeller, cycling with stakeholders, planning public transport, or coding junctions.
Ultimately, this adds up to my core role being to ensure Laurence, our CEO, can spend more time focusing on the company’s next steps.
How did you come to be working at City Science?
I have a background in mathematics and optimisation, starting my career as a business analyst at one of the largest energy companies in New Zealand. I then went on to several roles in transport planning and modelling in New Zealand, including delivering projects in Australia, both in the public and private sectors. In 2013, my wife and I moved to the UK to develop our careers – mine as a transport planner, specialising in transport modelling, public transport planning, and micro-simulation.
In 2015, I began half a decade at Transport for London, where I led their strategy and policy for London’s public transport network. Then, in the lead up to Covid-19 lockdowns, I had a surreal experience developing the transport manifesto and providing transport planning advice to Rory Stewart, the independent candidate for Mayor of London.
Overall, this provided me with a very wide experience base, in particular shifting comfortably between modelling and planning, something that has become invaluable in this role.
Despite a fulfilling career, none of the roles felt entirely aligned with my personal ethos. I was initially attracted to City Science because of its focus on automating transport models, and its foundation built on data. But actually it was, its desire for positive change in delivering decarbonisation that hooked me.
How did you start your City Science journey?
I started at City Science at the very start of March 2020 as only the second home worker, four days a week (spending a day with my daughters). I pitched this as one day we could effectively scale me up to full-time, but in 2020 there wasn’t a need for me 5 days a week, yet.
Home-working (pre-lockdown) came with the challenge of remotely building a transport consultancy business, travelling the southeast to see clients and travelling to Exeter to collaborate with Laurence and others. Two weeks later, lockdown was announced and everything changed: suddenly everyone was remote, and I had endless time with my kids at home, whilst transformatively being able to meet Laurence, team members, and clients from my lounge/office.
As consultancy grew from a few staff in 2020 to over 30, so did my role. Fortunately, at the start of September (2023) City Science gained an extra 25% of me, as my daughters are now both in school, and I scaled up to full-time.
Nowadays, all our team members are employed remote-first, and we try to offer the flexibility I experienced wherever we can, so the team can focus on delivering high-quality results for our clients.
Can you give examples of projects that you’ve worked on?
One of my early City Science projects was the Oxfordshire Infrastructure Strategy. It was a great example of delivering a highly multi-disciplinary strategy. The brief was to deliver an evidence-led, needs-based review of what was required in terms of infrastructure for Oxfordshire, with a desire to achieve Net Zero at its heart.
My role was to bring it all together, ensuring we had the right people in the right places to deliver each element of the project, and to be able to align the different workstreams (e.g. transport, housing, education) into one unified approach. Ultimately, I was responsible for delivering a single overarching narrative.
Building a team after lockdown has been another interesting project where we’ve been doing things differently. The situation gave us permission to build a remote-first organisation, and while people can work in one of our offices, including the one I set up in London, there is no requirement for them to do so.
This has resulted in the most flexible organisation I have ever worked at, and it is one of a number of progressive policies I have helped champion. Others include making City Science a welcoming environment for all, from showing our pronouns on the website to ensuring a gender-neutral approach to recruitment, unbias training, and doing all we can to be a fair, open and welcoming environment.
What motivates you most about the work you do at City Science?
I’m motivated by my deep affinity with sustainable transport, which has been the core theme running through my career.
City Science is a perfect outlet for that and, more broadly, is committed to delivering change for the greater good. For clients, that means City Science develops innovative tools that can help them make a difference, and is committed to making them as available and accessible as possible.
On top of that, I enjoy being part of an organisation where people can develop without constraint or feeling pigeon-holed, and where we operate in a genuine and honest manner.
What do you enjoy doing with your free time?
I enjoy spending time with my wife and two small children.
I also enjoy running and have completed ten marathons to date. I also organised two remote (socially distanced) marathons during lockdown to help my group of running friends, when official events were cancelled.
If I have any time left over, I also enjoy strategic board games like Pandemic.
If you could wave a wand and change some aspect of policy or legislation, what would it be and why?
If I could wave a wand and change some aspect of policy or legislation, it would be to mandate a half kilometre no-drop-off zone around schools at the start and finish of the school day. I believe this would make it much safer for children to walk to school and it would become the norm for most of them.
Ultimately, I believe that policies like these are simply justified by safety and by the maths. At the start and end of the school day, there are more children wanting to use the space, so they should have priority. This would not only improve safety, but it would in turn be good for the environment, build healthier habits, and encourage more sustainable transport.