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RTA, as the voice of the regional business community on transportation, strives to keep vital projects, priorities, and policies moving — and then have them move faster.

We survey the landscape and coordinate with our partners, while providing a business perspective, focus, and support.

As you would expect, we apply a regional lens to everything that we do. But what exactly does “regional” mean?

To me, regional does not mean “instead of” local. It means complementing and strengthening local priorities, by tying them together with the priorities of others, whenever the connections, common interests, and congruent timing is right.

On one hand, I am inclined to write that there is no formula for this; that there is an art to successful regional collaboration. And, that while you can accelerate projects, it is hard to “accelerate” relationships.

However, on the other hand, I actually do believe that there is a formula of sorts to get to a win-win faster.

The formula is simply this:   2/3 “me” + 1/3 “we” = accelerated regional success.

• By “me” I mean a local area’s or jurisdiction’s interests — regardless of what others think of them in the region.
• By “we” I mean those projects of a regional nature that will create or enhance our regional mobility fabric.

This ratio is not, in my view, 50-50. Local needs have to come first to maintain support and alignment with investment dollars, and my sense is that 2/3 is about right.

But the ratio is not 100-0 either — either way. If we only focus on local, we will effectively truncate or bifurcate the region and miss opportunities. Moreover, if we were to only focus on regional, we would be omitting the concerns of individual communities, and in the case of transit, we would likely be reducing needed connections that drive ridership.

In all cases, it is a local first and focused strategy, but a regionally aware one.

You might even say that we are building a regional cathedral, one brick — often a local one — at a time.