Prague's public transport network carries close to a billion passenger journeys a year through one of Europe's most protected historic city centres, while racing to modernise for the decades ahead. Balancing heritage, growth and technology is no small task, and few people understand that balance better than Jan Barchanek.

In this episode, Dr. Kaan Yildizgoz speaks with Jan Barchanek, Transport Director and COO of the Prague Public Transport Company (DPP), about running trams, buses and metro across a historic city with narrow streets and limited space for cars. Jan explains DPP's approach to smart electrification, the practicalities of driverless metro on Lines C and D, and how the ROPID-coordinated integrated ticketing system keeps buses, trams, rail and ferries working as one network. He also shares how DPP trains its workforce through its own dedicated training school, and why long-term financing certainty matters as much as new technology.

Whether you lead a transport authority, an operator, or a technology business supporting one, this conversation offers a clear, practical view of how a major European capital keeps its network resilient, affordable and people-focused.

Chapters

00:00 Podcast Intro

00:17 Meet Jan Barchanek

01:23 Career Journey at DPP

03:32 Running Transit in Historic Prague

05:41 Affordable Fares and Night Service

07:07 Smart Bus Electrification Strategy

09:57 Digitalization and Driverless Metro

11:30 Integrated Transport with ROPID

13:32 Workforce Training and Change

17:11 Vision for 2030 and Beyond

19:38 Final Takeaway and Outro

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Host: Dr. Kaan Yildizgoz

Producer: Mike Cartmel

Executive Producer: Darren Turpin

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Brand design: Tina Olagundoye

Digital Media: Belén Iturrioz Campo

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Thank you for listening to Mobility Redefined, brought to you by Modaxo. For more insights and information, please visit mobilityredefined.com. That is mobilityredefined.com.

Welcome to the Mobility Redefined Podcast, where we explore governance, strategy, and innovation shaping how cities and metropolitan regions are moving. I am Dr. Kaan Yildizgoz and today I am delighted to welcome Jan Barchanek, Chief Operations Officer and board member of Prague Public Transport Company. The company is also known as DPP, Dopravní podnik Prahy, one of Central Europe's most storied and technically sophisticated urban transport operators. Jan, thank you so much for joining Mobility Redefined today.

Thank you, Kaan. Thank you all for the invitation to this podcast. And I'm quite happy to hear you and to talk with you again.

Thank you. Thank you. Jan, we have known each other for almost 20 years now. It's always a pleasure to work together with you, Jan, and now you are playing a significant managerial role in a multimodal transport operator. And I know that you started your career all in public transport. You spent many years in this industry. And maybe, just before we go into the discussion in terms of the details of public transport topics in Praha, if you can give a little bit of background about yourself, because that's an interesting career, starting from the bottom and going up to now take the full operational responsibility in Praha.

Yes, thank you. I studied at Czech Technical University, in the Transportation Sciences programme. So it's a good background for me. And during my studies I had cooperation with our company, with DPP, for my diploma work on bus priority. And during my studies I got the possibility to cooperate on the organisation of the International Monetary Fund meeting in Prague, so on the bus services for the people attending this big event.

After that I got the possibility to lead the Quality department for the whole company, for all parts, metro, trams and buses. And again I got the possibility to go back to buses, and I was responsible for developing projects for the buses, for the new vehicles, for electrification, for the testing of different electric vehicles in buses.

So now I am responsible not only for buses, but also for trams, for Metro operations, and all the staff in operations. Not for maintenance, but for the operational side. So, in very few words, quite an interesting.

Quite a good, quite an impressive career in a public transport agency, in a city like Prague. And one question. What I always think when I'm travelling to Prague, or when I've talked in the past with other colleagues from DPP, is the challenge and uniqueness of governing and running a historic city's transit system. I myself started my career at Metro Istanbul, and it was very interesting, I guess it's similar in Prague as well. It was very interesting: whenever we were trying to construct a new metro line, each stage of the construction turned into a new episode, like an Indiana Jones movie, in a historic city like Istanbul. I know you have these challenges too, and Prague's network must balance a remarkable historic urban fabric with modern urban mobility demands. So how do you ensure the network continues to evolve within those boundaries?

I have to say that I'm quite proud to be involved in public transport in Praha, in Praha city, and responsible for connecting people, not only daily commuters, but also all the foreigners, all the visitors of Praha. And it's a combination of the history, a combination of the profile of the city, because we have narrow streets, we have a historical city which is protected, and we also have hilly terrain, not so much space for cars, especially for parking. So it's a big advantage for public transport that people were already using public transport before, and there isn't so much space for cars. So we are happy about that, but we have to provide quite efficient and also quite high-capacity public transport. So in some cases there is a trade-off in how to prepare such high-capacity public transport, how to build it, as you mentioned in Istanbul, the same situation when we prepare the metro, when we prepare some tram tracks. There are also different brownfield areas we are working in. In Praha there are new tram tracks and new housing areas, so there are a lot of challenges but also a lot of nice possibilities for how to work with transport and also with urban planning, and also to protect the heritage of Praha. So it's not easy to combine, and it's quite a big and quite important part of Prague public transport. It's supported by the city, because one of the key parts of this very good public transport is financial support from the city. So we have quite good support, not depending on the political parties, left or right, we have good support, especially on the finance side, especially for cheap fares. So when you come to Prague, the fares are quite cheap. So it's quite easy to.

I would call it affordable.

Yes.

I think that's what you are doing in Prague as well.

Yeah, we try to do, and we try to offer this public transport easy to use for the people. And of course, it's sometimes a little bit difficult for the budget.

Yeah, it's difficult. Now, I mean the municipal budgets or authority budgets are under pressure, especially after COVID-19, but they also want to offer public transport as a mode of choice, in an affordable way. It's a very difficult job that you are doing there, from this perspective, Jan.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we try, our company and also the authority and the coordinator, ROPID, try to operate very efficient public transport, not only during the day, during the peak period, but also on weekdays and during the night, night transport. So we are not operating the metro during the night, but we are offering tram and bus services to each part of Praha. So it's quite good, and in my opinion there's no need to have a car when you are living in Praha.

So that's the most important thing, how we can replace the need to use a car. And at the same time, I know that you are also preparing your network and your fleet for the future. From this angle, what I know is that DPP has been on an ambitious electrification path. Where does Praha stand today in terms of this transition of your fleet, in terms of decarbonisation?

I have had the opportunity to be involved in bus decarbonisation and the electric vehicle project in buses from close to the very beginning, not the very beginning of the technology, but the beginning of testing this kind of operation. We started in 2010, 2011 with small Italian, six-metre-long electric mini-buses. But the idea for us is not to provide electrification and decrease emissions in quantity as much as possible, regardless of the cost and regardless of how many vehicles we need. We try to focus on quality and efficiency, and as a result of this focus on efficiency, we try to electrify heavy-duty lines, where the emissions are a significant part of the total, for example, the line from the airport to the nearest metro station, because Praha is not yet connected from the airport to the city by train. The idea behind that is trolleybuses. Battery development allows us to combine conventional buses with battery technology, and for us that's more efficient than pure electric buses, because we would like to carry people, not batteries, not heavy batteries. So we decrease the weight of the batteries and we are able to carry more people. So it's about energy efficiency. I suppose we are active in electrification, but we would also like to take care not to electrify too much, because we have 100% of the metro electrified, 100% of the trams, and in buses we would like to have around 20 to 25% of vehicles not fully dependent on electricity. So it's a little bit complicated. We are discussing maybe some fuel cell options for the future, but for now, for resilience, I remember two times flooding in Prague, when the river rises and we have to stop the metro, we have to stop part of the trains, we need buses, we need independent buses. So our electrification, we try to do it smartly, we try to do it efficiently, and we try to make sure it doesn't stop operations in case of some troubles, like a blackout, for example.

Yes, I remember the challenges you were facing because of the river, causing issues in your metro network, in the metro stations and so on. It's very challenging from this perspective, not only being a historic city, but also because of this natural factor. I see what you are telling me. And not only electrification, I know that you are putting a lot of focus into technology deployment and digitalisation. Where are you on this, here in Prague?

This technology deployment is quite important for us, and quite important on the side of the vehicles, on the side of management, and last but not least on the side of customers, of ticketing, of information. In some cases we are doing well; in some cases we still need much more development, because we are not able to simply restart the systems, we need to continue with our existing systems. So, for example, in the metro, we are now working on driverless operation on the new Line D, and also the oldest line, Line C, from 1974. It will be a big technology change, this driverless metro, so we try to prepare these changes step by step in some cases, and with a bigger technology change in others. There's quite good cooperation again with the city, also with the coordinator, with online information at the stops, at the bus stops, at the tram stops, at the metro stations, and also different tools, different mobile apps. So it's quite important for us to use as many technologies as possible for information for our customers, because we have a lot of operations and a lot of changes, some planned, some unplanned. So it's quite important, internally and externally. And also a quite big question for us is cybersecurity.

Certainly, certainly. And I also imagine that, as a multimodal operator, technology helps you a lot in terms of an integrated and seamless experience for passengers. When I talk about integration, I'm talking beyond ticketing. How does integration look today in Prague, in terms of public transport?

The history of integrated transport in Prague started in 1992, when we tried to integrate some suburban bus lines. After that, an authority company, ROPID, was created, which is the coordinator responsible for preparing the same system and preparing rules for the system, not only for us as a publicly owned operator, but also for private operators of buses, especially suburban buses, as well as for Czech Railways and other private rail operators, and also for ferries on the river routes, and for some other users. So it's a long project of integration, and we try to offer our customers a seamless transport experience: to buy one ticket, to interchange where they need to, and to give them online information about interchanges and about delays and changes in the transport. So this needs cooperation, it needs rules. We have quality standards which are valid for all the companies, not only ours but also the others'. That's part of the contract with the city via this coordinator. So all the operators, not only our company but all the operators, have the contract and have to follow the rules. And we have quite good cooperation with the coordinator. We have meetings to prepare new lines, we have meetings to change the timetables, and it's a never-ending story. It's daily cooperation, daily work on that, and daily work also on customer feedback, with automatic passenger counting. It's a daily or monthly discussion on the budget and on the possibilities to support this integrated system. So it's the work of many people.

Now you say that it's the work of many people. I think that gives me very good grounds for my next question. I was planning to ask you about your view on the workforce in a changing environment. Public transport employs around 13 million people around the world, and I know big city operators are sometimes the largest employers in their cities. I don't know the case of Praha, for example, if I look at Brussels or Amsterdam, the local public transport operators are the largest employers there. I'm sure DPP is one of the largest employers in the city as well. As technology reshapes operations, how is DPP managing the human side of this transformation? That's very important, skill development, training, and bringing your people along on the journey. And what leadership lessons have you drawn from managing change at this scale?

Yes, our company has about 11,000 people, so it's the biggest employer in Prague, and one of the biggest in the Czech Republic. So you are right about that. Human resources are quite important, and we would be nothing without our people. We depend on our people, and even the driverless metro is not a peopleless metro. For us, that's perfect.

Perfect headline for us, the driverless metro is not the peopleless metro.

Yes. For us it's quite important to work with people, and one good example is that during the electrification of the buses, we used internal experience, experience from our tram colleagues. So we used their information, we used their experience, but we also had to train people, we had to train people from mechanics to electromechanics, we had to train people from the bus depots. And we have a subsidiary company, a training school, which is quite important for us, and we use it for these training programmes.

Oh, you have a company that's a training school, correct?

Yes, it's a subsidiary company, which is a school, and which is also open to pupils in the middle part of their education, from 15 to 19, but also open to us, to our employees, no matter how old they are. And it helps us to educate them and to increase their qualifications, especially in the electric field, but also in other areas. So cooperation is also important for us today, with other schools, with universities. It's quite important to reach people as soon as possible, when a new graduate is spotted at university. It's important for us, especially for new projects, and of course there's always discussion about whether we have enough drivers or not. So there's always discussion about salaries and other benefits, we have labour unions, and we discuss salaries and benefits with them every year. Our labour turnover is quite good compared to other Czech employers. So there are a lot of different solutions, a lot of different parts, and it's quite important to work with people, because especially in technical roles there is quite a significant shortage in the market.

Thank you, thank you. We have discussed a lot of topics, how you are running the system in a historic city like Prague, electrification, energy transition, technology deployment, automation in the metro, not only the different technology tools, but also metro automation. We've also talked about integration, and about the workforce, which is quite important. And before we conclude, I wanted to ask you one more question. Looking ahead to 2030 or 2040, what does successful public transport in Prague look like ten years from now and beyond? And what is the single capability that DPP needs to build most urgently right now, to be ready for the future?

In Prague, we are happy that ridership came back after the pandemic, and there are also a lot of people commuting daily from the central Bohemian region into Prague. So our numbers are increasing, and there are a lot of challenges in carrying the people we need to carry. But we have to follow technical development. As I mentioned, driverless metro is a flagship project for us, to change the technology after 51 or 52 years of metro operation. So that's a key project. In Prague, we are also happy that we are developing the tram network, so it's quite important for us to keep working on trams. We have new trams, and also this anti-collision system, increasing safety in tram operations. And also we need to find an efficient, long-term solution for low-emission and zero-emission bus operation, and combine all of that. Of course, we would like to work as much as possible with colleagues from the municipality on the development of urban planning for the city, because there are brownfield areas, and we are now trying to prepare public transport in time, not after the urbanisation, but during it. So that's quite important for us. And last but not least, it's long-term, sustainable financing of public transport, because, as I mentioned at the beginning, the fares are quite good for passengers, but this development, this new investment, new vehicles, a lot of new tracks for the new metro line, it's a huge investment. And we need to find a long-term, sustainable way to run the company. We now have, since 2025, a new public service contract for 22 and a half years, the maximum allowed under European regulation. We are quite happy with this contract, which also allows us to access European subsidies, and possibly some bank loans if we need them. So it's an important foundation for us to also be creative with the city in preparing our projects. But in any case, the project has to be efficient, has to be energy efficient, and ultimately has to work for the people, for the customers.

Jan, thank you for sharing your insights on managing one of Central Europe's most complex public transport networks. Before we close, what is one message you would leave with Mobility Redefined listeners looking to build systems that are not just technically advanced, but genuinely resilient and people-centric?

For me it's quite important, we are developing a lot of new technology, a lot of new systems, but don't forget the passengers. That's quite important for us, because we need to keep it simple, useful and easy to use for passengers. So don't forget your passengers.

Thank you, thank you. That's a very good conclusion, Jan. Thank you once again for being a guest on this episode of Mobility Redefined. And thanks to our listeners for joining and listening to this episode of Mobility Redefined. Looking forward to coming together for the next episode as well.

Thank you very much, all, and you'll be very welcome when you come to Prague. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to Mobility Redefined, brought to you by Modaxo. For more insights, visit our website at mobilityredefined.com, or follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favourite app to stay updated with our latest episodes. Thank you for tuning in, and we hope you enjoyed the conversation.