WJBC Forum: Getting from point A to point B

Low-fare carrier AirTran Airways was Central Illinois Regional Airport's second-largest airline in 2011. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Every thumbnail sketch of our community includes, somewhere near the top, the fact that we’re located in something of a transportation confluence and it is thanks to this we enjoy relative prosperity.

In fact, you’ll remember the community grew in its early days because we were on the route for westward expansion of the young nation.  People stopped here and were confronted with friendly folks and fertile fields and stayed.

The new Intermodal Transportation Center in Uptown Normal stands as an ever-growing monument to our kinship with mobility.  Here’s an element of transportation that many of us should be renewing our relationship with – the rails.  I’m going to ride the train to Chicago next week for the first time in, I think, about 25 years.  I can’t wait.

There’s public interest in transportation.  The film “Revenge of the Electric Car” played to a couple of sell-out houses last week and a mini-electric-vehicle salon saw, I’m estimating, about a thousand people go through its virtual turnstiles.

One reporter estimated the audience at a couple of dozen people.  Yeah, I know there’s a lot of territory between a couple of dozen and a thousand, but I think that reporter left before the doors officially opened to the public.  I was there all night.

Being transportation-minded, we appropriately have a lot of interest and concern about the opportunities that will be offered at the Central Illinois Regional Airport.  Kudos to the group of businesses and governmental institutions doing their best to entice a variety of carriers to service the area.  I’m confident about the likelihood of our successfully attracting another or several airlines.

You see, Frontier Airlines, or anybody else has to just take a look at this place for a short while;  get to know the people who live here, their drive to succeed, their pride in those successes, and above all their tendency to move about.  To transport themselves.

Flying in and out of the Central Illinois Regional Airport?  Profitable.  It’s a no brainer.

This is Dan Irvin, on WJBC’s forum.

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Dan is Secretary of the Board of the McLean County Chamber of Commerce, Vice-President of the Bloomington Public Library Foundation Board, and a member of the Heartland Community College Foundation Board.

The opinions expressed within WJBC’s Forum are solely those of the Forum’s author, and are not necessarily those of WJBC or Townsquare Media.