As the world’s most important public transport event, the UITP Summit 2026 will gather some 300 expert speakers across 70 sessions. This year, like every year, the programme delivering insights to thousands of global public transport professionals is decided by exactly that: global public transport professionals.

The UITP Summit Programme Committee, currently chaired by Tom Page, Transport for London (TfL), brings together key public transport figures to identify key insights, trends, and priorities. From hundreds of sessions proposed, dozens are selected to provide a truly global and representative image of what’s happening and what’s important in our sector.

The full UITP Summit 2026 programme will be revealed later this month, but in the meantime let’s go behind the scenes of the UITP Summit and hear from Programme Committee Chair, Tom Page, General Manager of TfL’s Docklands Light Railway.

Congratulations on your first chairing of the Programme Committee. What do you hope to achieve in the role?

I love the UITP Summit – it’s both critical to UITP and this fantastic opportunity for people from across public transport to come together, share and learn, discuss and go away galvanised with pride and the desire to do even better.

So, firstly I wanted the meetings to help contribute towards a great, diverse, global summit. I also strongly respect the time and views of those on the committee, so wanted to ensure that they had a voice, were listened to and, as much as possible, enjoyed the meetings.

Finally, putting the Summit together is a huge amount of work for the UITP team and I wanted to, wherever we could, make it easier for them to arrange a wonderful summit.

What are the challenges of chairing the Programme Committee?

The meetings have to move fairly quickly and keep to time; the most important bit is ensuring everyone has a chance to speak, not just the most confident or most well known speakers.

This is obviously hard as naturally those who are more confident will speak more and generally have excellent points. My focus has been on ensuring I don’t miss anyone, that everyone is introduced each time so we’re not assuming any knowledge and trying to keep the meeting light and positive enough that people feel encouraged.

It’s also been important to get the materials out in advance, partly because it’s vital for people to have properly digested the submissions, and it allows different kinds of committee members (some will be more reflective than others) to have time to form their views. This very much includes me!

I’ve found it challenging at times to distinguish between submissions, but that’s where the wider view of the committee adds so much value, and of course my job is not to pick; it’s to enable others to pick.

I think we’ve done well in terms of diversity; a challenge here is we still see a number of committees put forward only male speakers. I know we’ve been getting better and better in creating diverse panels with gender balance so huge credit to everyone who works towards this.

What steps are taken to ensure inclusion of the diverse UITP membership?

Some of the points are those made above; making the meetings accessible and listening to all. If you’re in an organisation which is on a journey to improve diversity it is also incumbent on those of us here now, especially me as chair, to be challenging ourselves.

The Summit is global and we need to hear from the world. We’ve ensured no panels are all one gender, we’ve worked session after session to broader the geographical diversity, and we’ve looked to move some proposed topics into a space where we’re talking about some of the challenges we need to overcome, such as some transport users feeling less safe at night than others.

We’ve done a lot to get the most rich and varied programme; we now need to make the Summit shine and then listen to feedback to make it even better and even broader next time.

Stay tuned for the full programme to be unveiled later this month.