#081: AVs & Rural Community Empowerment – Tammy Meehan Russell & Justin Johnson, Plum Catalyst (TRB 2023)

Minnesota’s Autonomous Rural Transit Initiative, goMARTI, is a unique community-led partnership to bring autonomous shuttles to Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Greg Rodriguez and Greg Rogers sat down with Tammy Meehan Russell and Justin Johnson at TRB Annual Meeting 2023 to explore how they worked with the Grand Rapids community to introduce an autonomous shuttle service powered by May Mobility. In this episode, you’ll hear Tammy and Justin share the secret sauce for deploying autonomous transit service alongside a community. The ingredients: a willing partner on the ground, community that wanted a new solution, university engagement, a tech partner willing to invest in a community—and, of course, a theme song written by the local driving instructor!Find more information about Plum Catalyst on their website: https://www.theplumcatalyst.com/ Read more about goMARTI: https://www.gomarti.com/ Find the theme song on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/6Rlwm1qffhvva2fCQigSUs And YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QQbnxLZXCM Tammy Meehan Russell Twitter: https://twitter.com/tammymeehan2 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tammymeehan/ Justin Johnson, Director of Technology, Plum CatalystLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinmarkjohnson/ Follow the Transportation Research Board on Twitter at @NASEMTRB and see highlights from this year’s annual meeting by searching for the #TRBAM hashtag on LinkedIn and Twitter.As always, you can follow us on Twitter: @MobilityPodcast, @MoveGreg, @Pete_Gould, @SmarterTranspo.

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