T4America Blog

Mayor John Robert Smith on urgency and the upcoming transport bill

Aaron Renn of the Urbanophile interviewed T4 America co-chair Mayor John Robert Smith at the Rail~Volution conference a few days ago in Boston, Mass., and shot this short video highly worth watching. Mayor Smith was the longtime mayor of his hometown of Meridian, Mississippi, where he worked tirelessly to open the state’s first multi-modal transportation hub in downtown Meridian along the Amtrak line that travels through. He gave an inspiring speech at our platform release earlier this year before coming to Washington, D.C., to serve as the T4 America co-chair and president of Reconnecting America.

Aaron says:

I was able to catch up with John Robert Smith, CEO of Reconnecting America, and he recorded a short two minute video for me. If you only watch one of the videos I post, make it this one. He makes two incredibly important points that are too often overlooked when it comes to the livable cities agenda. The first is that we need to build an urban-small town-rural coalition around a new transportation policy. The other is that these issues are, or should be, non-partisan.

Thanks to Aaron for the video.