Flutterby™! : Personal struggles

For years I've been able to say "come back when you know what you want and I'll build it". Two projects recently are mucking with this. The first is my service on the Petaluma Technology & Telecommunications Advisory Committee. The second is that I'm currently doing some research for a look at possible transportation futures.

In both of these the goal is much more of a matter of framing possibilities in ways that the various members of the audience can hear from their own various biases and perspectives so that they can make decisions based on that information.

This is a great growth opportunity for me.

One of the things that strikes me though is just how many competing agendas there are in transportation. Since their inception railroads have been huge mechanisms for transferring public dollars into private coffers, but as we start to look at the impacts and costs of car pool lanes versus buses versus passenger rail for various applications we start to see all sorts of evidence of transportation policy being used for wealth transfer, of infrastructure built out for disaster or emergency scenarios in interesting ways, of users making trade-offs between energy costs, overall operating costs, and capital costs in ways that tendril out into the economy in extremely complex ways.

This stuff is fascinating.