Perez supports Commuter Rail (and reminders of philosophy and Cianci)

Kudos to Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez for advocating for commuter rail
He writes that "a regional transportation system is an investment in our economy as well as our ecology. It will build on the various modes of transportation that already exist and connect them, with the goal being that they run more effectively and efficiently and serve more people. It will create jobs and make it easier to get to existing jobs."

Mayors sometimes be leaders of their own cities, but some can actually lead a region. The importance of mayors (and SelectBoards) across CT and Massachusetts working for a common regional purpose is more critical now than ever before. Transportation is communication: we link
Witness this scene from RI:

In the late 1800s, the powerful railroads filled in the remnants of the Great Salt Cove. Further development covered over large swaths of the Moshassuck and Woonasquatucket rivers, which flowed into the Providence River to the Bay.

Early in the 1990s, some of [then Mayor Vincent "Buddy"] Cianci’s staffers gave him an old black-and-white photograph of downtown Providence, bisected by unsightly railroad tracks and freight yards, with the inscription: “Prov – B.C. – Before Cianci.”

By then, the rail yards were gone, replaced by the glittering Waterplace Park and the resurrected rivers, which had been uncovered and moved during the 1980s in an ambitious, $40-million project financed primarily by the federal government.

In 1974, when Cianci first ran for mayor against Joseph Doorley, he championed a plan by a Rhode Island School of Design professor to move the railroad tracks and uncover the river. But there was no money, and Cianci, faced with other challenges, never pursued it after he was elected.

Four years later, when the Federal Railroad Administration planned a major upgrade of rail service between Boston and Washington, the then-director of the Providence Foundation, Ron Marsella, suggested that the federal money be used to move the tracks instead of simply fixing them.

The idea caught on with then-U.S. Sen. Claiborne Pell, a railroad buff, who proved key in winning approval. Cianci and his political rival, Gov. J. Joseph Garrahy, both jumped on board and lobbied in Washington, even as they were preparing to run against one another for governor in 1980 — issuing dueling press releases about who deserved credit.

Moving the tracks opened up downtown land for redevelopment, including the site of the Providence Place mall.

The Capital Center Commission, a quasi-public agency whose members were appointed by the governor, the mayor and the nonprofit Providence Foundation, was created in 1980 to shepherd the development.

The project was moving forward in 1983 when the new director of the Providence Foundation, Kenneth Orenstein, saw the plans and panicked — Capital Center engineers had proposed paving over the rest of the Providence River for a new road. Orenstein turned to architect Bill Warner, who was studying potential waterfront uses, and Warner sketched out a plan to uncover the river and move the confluence of the three rivers 100 yards east, to its current location near the Citizens Bank building. "

(for a more theoretical turn, see here (from Mattelart): "Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), a railway engineer turned philosopher, took the idea of communication as an organic system even further. His 'social physiology' - which existed in outline form in 1852, seven years before the publication of Darwin's major work, The Origin of Species, and was explicitly formulated starting in 1870--carried to an extreme the hypothesis of continuity between the biological and the social order. The physiological division of labour and the progress of the organism went together. From the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from the simple to the complex, from concentration to differentiation, industrial society is the embodiment of 'organic society': an increasingly coherent, integrated society-as-organism in which functions are increasingly well defined and parts increasingly interdependent In this systematic whole, communication is a basic component of organic systems of distribution and regulation. Like the vascular system, the former ,(made up of roads, canals and railways) ensures the distribution of nutritive substance."