Transportation for America: Townhall meeting at Google
Googlers Wayne Lin, left, and Jessica Wei hold a Transportation for America sign last week after the Google Town Hall Meeting. Jessica Wei is Partner Development Manager for Google Transit.
A few months ago, you may have noticed the “Transportation for America” badge that appeared in the sidebar of the Trillium Solutions blog. Transportation for America is a coalition advocacy effort aimed at improving US transportation policy to create equitable, sustainable, and cost-effective transportation and make cities, suburbs, and rural places safer and more livable. The advocacy effort is timed to influence the upcoming re-authorization of SAFETY-LU, the federal law that determines how billions of transportation dollars are spent.
The group is holding a series of town hall meetings across the U.S. Apparent recognizing the importance of easy to use travel information for sustainable mobility, the first Transportation for America town hall meeting at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.
Here’s an excerpt from the complete blog post, “Thinking big: The Google Town Hall Meeting”:
Over the past year, I have spoken to many different crowds about transportation reform across the country. I asked people what they want to see from our federal government about transportation – what we fund and how we fund it.
But never before did I talk with an audience that said anything like this:
“Please figure out how to make transit authorities hand over their transit service information so that we can create a seamlessly integrated system of all transit services accessible through the web.“
And they know how to do it!
As I spoke with our crowd at the Google town hall, people offered their visions of our future transportation network. It’s clear that they were thinking big and visionary.
- A cell phone networked and safe ridesharing program for an entire region.
- A nation with increased access to transit service through more widespread service, but also through clear, thorough information shared about the services that already exist.
- Access to transit timetables and route information from all agencies nationwide so that developers like Google can make that data available to all users on their phone or web.
- An interstate rail highway that crisscrosses the nation, where the rails are publicly owned like our roads, and any company that has a train engine and car can use the system.
Every town hall meeting is a one-of-a kind. And Google certainly held true to that. Google staffers envisioned a future where every person with a cell phone or access to the web would be able to easily find a shared free ride or the fastest route with trains and buses to get to school, work or home.
Two years after: Google Transit for Humboldt County
Last Saturday, I presented at the Wheels of Change conference in Humboldt County, CA by video conference.
Trillium client Humboldt County was roughly the 17th area in North America to join Google Transit. Since that time, the main transit agency, Redwood Transit System, has posted a greater than 40% increase in ridership. They have one of the best farebox return ratios of any rural transit system in California.
Now there are more than 115 North American areas include in Google’s transit trip planner. It’s exciting to see and report this progress.
The audience was particularly interested in future possibilities for online transportation information. I showed Walkscore.com’s transit time maps, ByCycle.org, and Atlanta’s multi-modal trip planer, among other projects.
How can transit ride America’s latest craze for change?
There are too many good stories on transportation, energy, climate change, the economy, how they are related, and how to intelligently connect them in new U.S. policies swirling around on the web to pretend to offer much of an inventory, but I thought I’d post a roundup of a few recent articles and editorials that have caught my eye:
Energy markets are hard to predict right now, and, as a sign of the irrationality, oil is undervalued — “Oil at $38 [a barrel] is free” (Is Obama’s Infrastructure Plan Built to Last? from Energy & Capital).
A long-term view on oil is that we’re at the peak of the supply curve, and it will become more expensive in the coming years. So, let’s prepare now — not with spending stimulus dollars on highways but with the right investments. The stimulus needs to be used not just to create jobs, but the right jobs; not just infrastructure, but the right infrastructure.
As the on-target Transportation for America advocacy effort points out, Americans came out strongly in support of transit ballot measures this last November. As a sign of the that support, Bullet Trains & Light Rail have been voted high on the top 10 list at change.gov.
And yet, much (three quarters) of the transportation spending proposed in the stimulus package is business as usual — highway construction. This may not be an especially smart investment right now. The plight of automakers presented some tough issues, but I can’t help but feel that we let the crisis go to waste and failed to implement more ambitious and needed plans to restructure transportation in our nation. See the New York Times Op-Ed on how we should be transitioning automakers to transport makers.
I see advocates mobilizing and talking around Transportation for America and streetsblog.net, both very impressive efforts. I can’t help but thinking that there is a lot more opportunity to form partnerships and work effectively to advocate for solutions. I often hear transit agencies talking about how frustrated they are with the unclear and emerging picture of how they will be funded in 2009, and, of course, of the ongoing struggle to get politicians to see transit as a valuable, dividend-paying public investment.
It’s my wish these transit agencies realize that there is a gathering movement online for better public transportation and pedestrian and bike infrastructure, and that transit agency involvement offers to make everyone’s advocacy efforts more powerful and better-designed. I believe Trillium is a small part of this sea change, but would like to be bigger part, and invite others to jump in as well. Read more
Thoughts on “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of organizing without organizations”
By now most people know about Wikipedia, the collaboratively-written encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Isn’t that great and impressive that millions of people who don’t know each other can create such a useful and comprehensive resource? There are many other powerful examples of online collaboration, and sometimes it seems as if there is an equal number of books on the shelves that promise to explain the collaborative production revolution.
Can you tell from my tone that I’ve become cynical about the collection — sometimes it seems like a genre — of books that surround this subject? Well, there’s at least one that I can say is well worth reading — Here Comes Everybody.
Here Comes Everybody is full of examples of internet tools being used for social movements, and collaborative production, including examples that lots of people have heard of (Wikipedia and Linux), and other less-commonly known or discussed examples like political flash mobs in Belarus, citizen journalists in the 2004 southeast Asian tsunami, or the effort to get one woman’s mobile phone back in New York City. Some of the most interesting examples are those which failed, and Shirky discussed what was missing from them — whether it lacked a plausible promise, an acceptable bargain, or just used the wrong technology.
Recently, I returned to some of the ideas and examples in Here Comes Everybody to think about what they may mean for public transit agencies and transit advocates. Read more
Transit wins big in elections! (and Trillium plays a part)
It was great to see U.S. voters come out in support of transit in a big way in the 2008 election. Here in California, some notable victories included Proposition 1A, a $10 billion bond measure for California high-speed rail, Measure R for transit in Los Angeles County, and Measure Q for Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit.
I’m proud to report that Trillium volunteered to be part of the Measure Q victory for Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit, a proposal for a half-cent sales tax to fund commuter rail service along the congested 101 corridor in Sonoma and Marin Counties and connect to San Francisco Bay Ferry service.
The Yes on Q campaign wanted to be smart about their online outreach, so they asked for some help and advice. Especially because there are a few universities, junior colleges, and tech companies in the area, I suggested that creating a Facebook group might be a good way to recruit volunteers and supporters.
