Transportation For America » Thinking big: The Google Town Hall Meeting

Thinking big: The Google Town Hall Meeting

April 23, 2009
By Stephen Lee Davis

Google Transit and T4 Originally uploaded by Transportation for America

Googlers Wayne Lin, left, and Jessica Wei hold a Transportation for America sign last week after the Google Town Hall Meeting. Jessica Wei works on Google Transit, the free service that integrates public transportation timetables and routes into their popular maps application.

We want to amplify your voice, your vision for the future of transportation in America. So what should the future look like in your community? To help develop your community’s vision, we’re working to coordinate a series of town hall and house meetings all across the country.

And we want you to hold a meeting of your own.

One of the first stops on our cross-country town hall meeting tour was Google’s headquarters in California.

Last week, several of Google’s developers shared the latest in transit-tracking technology and real-time traffic mapping with our staff, and we got a chance to dig deep into the federal policy changes that could make our nation a more livable place for drivers, riders, and walkers.

Here’s a short summary of the meeting at Google from T4 Outreach Director Ilana Preuss:

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.

So Google has had their say. What about your community?

We want to bring your voice, your vision for the future of transportation to Congress and President Obama. We want to tell them about the projects you want in your town, your goals for travel and living options, or your needs for getting employees and goods to your business.

To develop your community’s vision, hold a town hall or a simple house meeting in your community using a Transportation for America toolkit. Then, submit your community’s ideas to become part of the national vision for our new transportation in the 21st Century.

Find out more about holding a Town Hall or House meeting.

Filed under: Campaign Blog
Tags: featured, google, public transportation, town hall, transit

http://greenneworleans.wordpress.com Christopher M. Johnston

I’ve been trying to get my local transportation officials to give that data to Google for months. I wish there was a way to just get it if they won’t cooperate.
Steve Davis

Christopher, do check out the saga that some of us here in DC went through with WMATA. Might give you some ideas for how to press on your local transit agency to start providing the data. Read through the posts on Google from Greater Greater Washington:

http://greatergreaterwashington.org/blogposts.cgi?filter=tag&label=Google
http://www.trilliumtransit.com/blog/2009/05/06/transportation-for-america-townhall-meeting-at-google/ Transportation for America: Townhall meeting at Google : Trillium Solutions blog

[...] 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 [...]
Jack Van Dien

You have the cart before the horse. Most of western Europe has aexceptional public transportation from high speed trains to light rail to subways to buses, all interlocking to make it possible to live without a car. That probably is not possible in the U.S. due to (1) paranoia about being attacked by bogeymen, and (2) obstinate entrenched bureaucracies in EPA and the Dept of Energy which, supported by rigid congressmen, will block any cohesive public transportation, and (3) the wholesale goods cartels which make it impossible for local stores to compete with box stores and malls. It isn’t possible to build the neighborhoods first and the infrasturcture sometime in the future.
Larry

How to “extend” public transport use in suburbs? Looking for successful strategies to prompt more usage within a town, to reduce traffic in town center, and at peak times. Seniors and Students are the primary users (would keep parents off the roads…).