The MT Position

Posted by Fred Jandt
Mass Transit magazine editor

How pervasive is transit? In your community? In the United States? In the world? This among other questions came to mind as I visited Chicago this week for the APTA Rail Conference. And after three days of seminars and meetings, I think there is a new formula that can be applied to transit.

Einstein’s theory of relativity is actually a couple of theories, which when combined explain pretty much how the universe works (in layman’s terms). Most of us think of his theory as the equation E=mc², although that is just a part of it. It’s actually the formula for mass-energy equivalence. Strangely enough, APTA president, Bill Millar, came up with a similar formula for transit during his speech at Monday’s opening seminar even though he probably doesn’t realize it.

In Bill’s speech he discussed how transit is a benefit to the environment, energy independence and the economy. He also talked about how transit can increase quality of life. So I propose a new formula I call the theory of mass transit-quality of life equivalence. Here it is:

Q=me³

Breaking it down, that’s: Quality of Life = mass transit x environment/energy/economy. It won’t stand up as a mathematical proof, but it just might be a simple enough theory to catch on and it would look real good on a button.

This year’s Rail Show was overflowing with like-minded individuals (sometimes literally) salivating over the increased interest in and demand for rail in the United States. It was an almost palpable upbeat feeling. It was something I haven’t felt in transit for a while now.

But now we need to take that feeling and disperse it to the all of transit’s customers. We need to simply and easily explain how transit benefits everyone on multiple levels in multiple ways. We need to take Bill’s message and distill it down to its essence and spread the word in a way everyone can understand: Q=me³

Applied transit improves your quality of life. Simple.

I’ve got a small request to end the blog this week.

A task force established by APTA’s executive committee is in the midst of developing recommendations on APTA’s governance and committee structure - from the top down - which it plans to forward later this summer for consideration by the executive committee. This restructuring will reorganize its executive committee, board of directors and many of its committees. As always, APTA isn’t doing this without member input. It needs comments on the plan from its members to make sure it can and is serving you the best way it can.

To that end, a presentation was put together and shown at this year’s Rail Show. For those of who missed it or weren’t in attendance, please take the time to check it out (you can find a PDF of it here) and send your comments to Fran Hooper or Art Guzzetti. They would be most appreciative.

Thanks for reading the MT Position updated every Friday,

Fred
fred.jandt@cygnusb2b.com
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This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 7:37 am and is filed under MT Position. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.