Day 7: Meeting CCTA’s new head, Randy Iwasaki

Monday evening, as the Car-Free Challenge came to a close, I trekked out to Walnut Creek to a reception for Randy Iwasaki, the new Executive Director of the Contra Costa Transportation Authority. My colleague Olivia deBree and friends at Save Mount Diablo put together a nice reception, attended by many allies in public health (American Lung Association, Contra Costa Health Services), neighborhood associations, and transit/bike/ped advocacy folks, particularly several friends from the East Bay Bicycle Coalition).

This was the second time I’d met Randy in his new role. He comes across a lot better than Bob McCleary, the former ED who was … well, let’s just say we didn’t see eye-to-eye on much. I look forward to working with Randy and seeing him bring new leadership to Contra Costa, a county which encompasses a lot of the diversity of California as a whole: from Central Valley farmland to depressed urban corridors, with affluent (and not-so-affluent) suburbs in between.

For the Car-Free Challenge, getting to the reception and back was an opportunity to log an extra 33-ish miles on BART. In our intra-family competition, that put me back ahead of B for our car-free to car-mile ratio!

For the rest of our family, today was a pretty normal schoolday. I walked B+N to the morning school bus, came home for a meeting with neighbors, then headed off to work on BART. Kim walked up to campus, picked up kids from after-school program and came home on the bus.