That’s right, get excited about a possible new AC Transit Board member! East Bay Transit advocates, a group consisting of members of many of the East Bay’s leading alt. transportation advocacy groups, have decided to endorse Elizabeth Echols for appointment to the AC Transit Board of Directors on February 25th. It wasn’t necessarily easy….but it was definitely the right decision. In November, AC Transit Director Rebecca Kaplan was gloriously elected to the Oakland City Council leaving a seat open on the AC Transit Board which should be filled next week. Echols has just returned from D.C. where she worked on Obama’s transition team as a member of the Science, Tech, Space and Arts Team. Previous to that she worked for Google as the Director of Policy, Global Online Sales and Operations. And previous to Google she was appointed by Al Gore as the Executive Director of Electronic Commerce Working Group.
Personally, I’m excited by Echols vision of the role of Board Director as setting goals and policy while challenging AC Transit staff to meet them. Not a nuts and bolts, “put the stop at the corner of Oak and Ninth” planner, Echols has a great understanding of data and information and its use to support decision making, challenge preconceptions, and help bring transparency to performance issues that have plagued numerous AC Transit lines for years. Without prodding, Echols quickly identified the issues that AC Transit riders are familiar with, reliability, customer service, reliability and did I mention reliabilty? A supporter of BRT, and a non-Van Hool hater, Echols also thinks the Van Hool “issue” was allowed to become bigger than it should have been by a too-slow realization that riders had real concerns that needed to be acknowledged and addressed.
Echols will fit nicely into the current board while bring yet another perspective to the board in support of AC Transit’s broad goals. I am convinced that Echols will work well with AC Transit’s staff, pushing them to challenge the agency to do more, even in these times of financial incertitude. There were a number of solid candidates, but in the end Echols rose above the pack with her rational vision for an AC Transit that not only provides a better service to its existing riders, but looks to leverage an improved service into greater ridership numbers.
AC Transit, staff, drivers and riders and the community at large will be extremely fortunate if on February 25th, the AC Transit Board appoints Elizabeth Echols to become their colleague. Echols is all the rage on the blogs today, check it out at:
[...] for another take on why we endorsed Echols, check out Stop, Drop and Roll, John Knox White’s Alameda based [...]