While writing this President’s message, I am sitting in an office of the Indian Railway Ministry, in a workshop break, to discuss the possibility of an Annual Conference in Delhi. Our Indian colleagues are most interested in inviting T2M to Delhi and turning our Association into a truly global reality.

In eight months, T2M will meet in Lucerne for our seventh annual conference. The organizing committee, the secretariat and the president are busy, preparing a stimulating conference on Energy and Innovation, and I trust you are busy, preparing papers and sessions. The call for papers was sent around before Christmas, and the deadline for submission of papers and whole sessions is approaching fast: please don’t miss April 15th to send in your proposal addressing either our annual theme “Energy and Innovation,” or other topics in our field. Annual conferences are open to all themes within the history of transport, traffic and mobility.

Our secretary of T2M, or better, our managing director, Sjoerd van der Wal has handed over the important and time consuming responsibilities to Sonja Beekers, in order to have more time to finish his PhD thesis. Sjoerd: we all are very thankful for your great job as managing director of our Association! We count on your further help, advice and support to keep T2M running and to help Sonja. Sonja is also based at the European Center for Mobility Documentation ECMD in Helmond, where we had our Annual Conference 2007.  Sonja: Welcome on board! You are now the communicative heart of our association. The EC members are looking forward to see you during our midterm meeting in Lucerne on April 22.

When this Newsletter is sent out, we are still waiting for the second issue of JTH 2008. It is not the fault of the editors but of the publisher. We knew the publisher is slow, but the velocity this time is nevertheless astonishing. It definitely has to speed up in the years to come. Please do not lose your faith that the journal will finally appear in your postbox. Other aspects of T2M business are under more direct control and are good news:
Thanks to Mathieu Flonneau and his creative design team, we have a new logo for T2M. For me, its visual message conveys the importance of modern transport infrastructures and thus the importance of our field. Our old logo too had an implicit message: the combination of transport, traffic, and mobility is not just an addition but an exponential multiplication for the attractiveness of our field. We should find a place to continue to use the old logo and message.
Thanks to Luisa Sousa, we have new flyers promoting T2M, targeting different audiences. You can download the flyers from our homepage or ask Sonja (info@t2m.org) to send you some (in colour).

Soon, we will have a new website too. Jamey Wetmore, Mike Esbester and others have collected material and Esther Kochte in Berlin has started to put material on the web in a creative way. If you have suggestions for new content of our website, please do not hesitate to contact me or Jamey Wetmore.

I am very much looking forward to a fruitful T2M year. We still have 10 months left in 2009 to change the world; yes, we can.