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Date: 1/18/2023
LONGMEADOW – Most people in Longmeadow know Rebecca Townsend as the town moderator, but the communications professor has also been a lifelong advocate of public transportation and rail service. It is this work which brought her to Gov. Maura Healey’s attention and earned her a place on the administration’s Transportation Transition Committee.
Healey’s transition committees began meeting on Jan. 5. According to the Healey-Driscoll Administration’s transition website, https://healeydriscolltransition.com, Townsend and 23 other people are tasked with “making sure our public transportation infrastructure is safe, reliable, affordable and connects our entire state.”
Townsend said she believes east-west rail can be an integral part of that goal. “I hope that [Massachusetts] are leaders in rail and invest in transportation,” she said.
When growing up in Rhode Island, Townsend regularly took public buses and her father commuted to Boston by train. When she moved to Western Massachusetts, she found bus service “lacking” and rail service “missing.”
Townsend became an alternate on the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission. It was there, in 2006, that she learned about plans for the New Haven-Hartford-Springfield rail line. Part of getting that project off the ground was working with an advocacy group. Not seeing one in the area, Townsend decided to create the Pioneer Valley Advocates for Commuter Rail (PVACR).
Connecticut was “moving much faster” than Massachusetts in its adoption of rail. There was interest in a line that connects Boston to Springfield, but the line from New Haven to Springfield was more realistic in the near term, Townsend said. The PVACR decided that a rail line to Boston could be built later, connecting to the Connecticut line in Springfield.
From 2010 to 2012, Townsend ran a research project exploring ways to give a voice on transit issues to people who were generally considered “hard to reach” – people of color, low-income individuals and transit-dependent people. Rather than rely on asking people to come to a meeting during the workday, Townsend worked with community college students to go to where groups of the individuals they were trying to reach already gathered. For example, she said, they sent a Spanish-speaker to a Spanish-speaking church to talk about people’s transit needs. For this work, the White House named Townsend a 2012 “Champion of Change for Transportation Innovation.” Since 2016, Townsend has been working with Trains in the Valley, which was a founding member of the Western Mass Rail Coalition.
Western Massachusetts is designed for travel by car. “There are no other options,” Townsend said.
“People in eastern Massachusetts have those options and have a vibrant economy. It can be a great equalizer.” She said the ability for people to easily move from one part of the state to another can make the entire state “more vibrant.”
Townsend sees rail as more than a solution to how people travel. Moving freight by rail is also essential for the vigorous economy that she would like to see in Western Massachusetts. “Sustainable infrastructure can create much more dynamism in a region,” Townsend said, “economic, environmental, there’s so many aspects.”
Townsend points to her time teaching in Poland. She said she was able to teach in one city on Saturday and, on Sunday, teach in another city as far from the first as Springfield is from Boston. She said, “I was able to move about the country quickly, easily and comfortably. Why wouldn’t we want that here?”