The Squeaky Wheel Podcast Sam Johnson Reveals the Amazing Potential of the World Bank
The World Bank might not be the first organisation that active travel advocates think of as an important potential partner. But with billions of dollars at their disposal they’ve already been enabling some amazing projects around the world, in part through the work of the highly motivated expert who was our inspiring guest this month.
Sam Johnson is a Sustainable Transport Specialist with the World Bank and Visiting Researcher at the Technical University of Eindhoven, focusing on innovation and urban mobility transitions. He has worked in transport infrastructure advisory for the World Bank with many national governments over the last eight years.
Sam co-leads the World Bank’s Active Mobility Community of Practitioners and is a strong advocate for people-centric urban design and reducing car dependency to foster more vibrant, equitable, affordable, healthy, and green cities.
On UN Sustainable Transport Day (November 26, 2025), he plans to release an independent, ambitious publication arguing why and how to invest up to 10% of Government road budgets in Livable Streets in all 193 UN member states by the end of the United Nations Decade of Sustainable Transport (2026-2035). The work is tentatively titled ”Investing 10% of Road Budgets in Livable Streets for 2035.
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Sam packed a huge amount of exciting information into his chat with us, often about places and projects that most of us will have been until now completely unaware of.
If any of these topics interest you, below are a series of links through which you can find more information.
Here is a link to the cyclingMAX tool that the World bank Group developed in conjunction with the ITDP (Institute for Transportation & Development Policy) and the GFDT (Global Facility to Decarbonise Transport)
On 3rd June World Bank Group staff members created a “human bicycle” to celebrate World Bicycle Day. Here’s a link to a video and post by Nicolas Peltier, Global Director Transport, World Bank.
During our interview with Sam, he spoke about progress being made with cycling and active travel plans in some unexpected cities around the world.
Here are links that he kindly supplied to four cities and countries that he mentioned.
We’ll also include a link to a detailed power point presentation that Sam gave to the Velo-city 2025 conference in Gdansk, Poland. It includes excellent photos, charts and maps about Tianjin’s vision to transform their city into a vibrant, liveable, active travel friendly destination.
What’s Up
Phil mentions two major projects underway in Sydney, Australia.
Here are photos of the opening day of the new Oxford St protected cycle lane and Sydney and the new ramp currently under construction at the Sydney Harbour Bridge, including one showing the five flights of stairs that it will be replacing.
Irene mentions ITS Australia's announcement of world-leading research by a multi-party government led team which explored how to better leverage existing data and technology to deliver safer, faster and more efficient road travel, shaping a future of seamless mobility. By incorporating See.Sense data in the project they found that cyclist movement and braking data revealed hidden safety risks and flow inefficiencies, providing actionable insights for intersection and infrastructure design.
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