Bright focused on urban studies and Latin American studies as an undergraduate in Canada, before pursuing a postgraduate degree in the UK in Globalisation and Latin American Development.
Before moving to Australia, she worked for a think tank in London, where she completed research and engagement studies on the transformational High Speed 2 (HS2) rail project. Expected to commence operations in 2026, HS2 will eventually connect London, Birmingham, the East Midlands, Leeds and Manchester.
“We were looking at the wider benefits, so we were trying to consider when people arrive at the station, what kind of experience will they have connecting to other forms of transport. The question was – how do we make a station a place, rather than just an interchange?”
Over the course of the almost five-year study, the research helped shape the conversation about the wider economic and spatial benefits of the project.
“You could see the conversation shift from being simply about a rail line, to being about regeneration and rebalancing the economy. Beyond the engineering elements, it became a discussion about how this project could help connect communities.”
While in London, Bright also saw the potential for transport planners to collaborate with telecommunications companies to source aggregated, anonymised mobile phone data to provide insights on transport paths and flows.
“You can see the patterns when people are travelling on a train, how the cell phones will all ping off the cell tower at the same time and then they'll go quiet, and then they'll ping off a different cell tower further down the line.
“You can literally see – particularly when integrating this data with the Wi-Fi data on the London Underground – the exact routes used by people to get to and from work. I think it's a really valuable data set that can be immeasurably useful to transport planners.”
Currently reading: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
Currently listening to: The Urbanist podcast (produced by Monocle Magazine)
Get in touch: 0413 347 727, Bright.Pryde@aurecongroup.com