https://www.berkshirepublishing.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/BP7SophiaMumford1_podcast.mp3 In this podcast, you’ll hear the voice of a woman who was born in the nineteenth century. Her name is Sophia Wittenberg Mumford, and in the two years before she died, we were working on a book about her life. I would visit her once or twice a week in Amenia, New York, and [...]
Ray Oldenburg introduced the term "third place" in 1989, and it's now ubiquitous. Property developers, museum planners, and shared workspace companies use it - sometimes accurately and sometimes not. This phone conversation took place on Ray's 88th birthday, in April 2020. Karen Christensen, who is writing the new coauthored edition of The Great Good Place, [...]
Today's Train Time conversation with Massachusetts State Representative Christina Minicucci ranges widely. We talked about issues that affect the travel choices of people in Rep Minicucci's district, and in fact pretty much everywhere: frequency, reliability, and cost. We talked about trains, of course, but also about bike and hiking trails and safe streets. These other [...]
On this episode of Train Time we're talking to Rep William (Smitty) Pignatelli about his advocacy for new connections for western Massachusetts. Host Karen Christensen explains, "I'm delighted to welcome my own representative, Smitty Pignatelli of Lenox, to Train Time. Rep Pignatelli has been a great advocate for regional equity, in transportation as well as [...]
Tom Sexton On this episode of Train Time, Tom Sexton, NE Regional Director for the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, explains the growing movement to combine passenger rail service and multi-use trails. While many people think that trails mean no trains, the reality is that the two forms of transportation work well together, and offer benefits to both [...]
Wayne Davis is renowned for his success in building support for the Downeaster, an exemplary passenger train service that runs from Boston to Maine. He's also known for his continued efforts to strengthen the coalition of rail advocates across New England. In this podcast, Wayne tells his story along with his colleague Bruce Sleeper, who [...]
Ben Heckscher sees transparency as one of the keys to building back better At Union Station in Springfield, Massachusetts you can buy a ticket to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. But you cannot buy a ticket to get you to Fenway Park in Boston. With the Infrastructure Bill finally passed by Congress, we turn to [...]
This letter was sent to the Massachusetts Department of Transportation during the comment period for the draft East-West Rail Study and is published as a guest post with permission. The Massachusetts Sierra Club simply urges you to commit to East-West Passenger Rail and to develop and implement a plan to achieve it as soon as [...]
This conversation with Jim Mathews, CEO of the national Rail Passengers Association, began when he and host Karen Christensen met at the 40th Annual NYS Passenger Rail Advocates Meeting & Lunch in Albany on 7 March 2020, just days before the US lockdowns began. Mathews frequently talks about the important of measuring the value [...]
We're speaking with Chris Dempsey, director of Transportation for Massachusetts (T4MA), about the “us or them” mentality that often pervades transport funding, and the efforts is making to build connections across the entire state, including out to western Mass and even to Berkshire County, which we sometimes call western western Mass. In this [...]
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