AMMA Transit Planning was established in 1987 as A-Menninger-Mayeda-Alternative, a transportation planning partnership with developed expertise in community-level public transit services and a focus on small urban, rural public and specialized transit.  AMMA’s founding partners consolidated and built upon the transit background, human services policy analysis and quantitative skills of its two principals, Tadashi A. Mayeda and Heather Menninger.  Since 2003, with the death of Mr. Mayeda, Heather Menninger has been sole proprietor of AMMA Transit Planning.  In recent years AMMA’s early focus on implementation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) provided a foundation for strategic and operational responses to increase transit demand in rural and suburban settings.  These included operationalizing coordination strategies.

AMMA possesses considerable expertise in transit and transportation policy planning with its emphasis on paratransit operations, institutional analysis, financial analysis and forecasting, community needs assessment, and public participation and outreach.  AMMA has provided time-tested recommendations for project design and implementation to dozens of unique settings.

AMMA’s national experience includes a Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) project on innovation in rural and small urban transit, published as TCRP Report 70. AMMA was responsible for research among all the western United States.  Heather Menninger has published several articles in the Transportation Research Record, most recently documenting the measurable impacts of controlling ADA trip growth for Orange County Transportation Authority, in Orange County, CA. (TRB No. 2034, December 2007).

As necessary for clients, AMMA has prepared grant applications, designed various computer tools, undertaken statistical analyses, developed inventories, managed significant public participation efforts and performed the full range of planning activities necessary to support improved management, financial planning and implementation of enhanced paratransit, transit and specialized transportation programs.

AMMA Transit Planning has been registered with Dun & Bradstreet for the past 20 years.

AMMA Transit Planning is certified as a Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) from the states of California, North Carolina, and Kansas.

AMMA is also certified as a Woman-Owned Business Enterprise (WBE) and a Small Business Enterprise (SBE) in the State of California.

AMMA Transit Planning holds membership or affiliation with:
             American Planning Association (APA);
             California Association for Coordinated Transportation (CalACT);
             Community Transportation Association of America (CTAA);
             Transportation Research Board, Paratransit Committee Friend;
             Women's Transportation Seminar (WTS).

- Tadashi A. Mayeda   1925 - 2003 -

“Tad” Mayeda was AMMA’s other founding partner, bringing to transportation analyses the rigor and quantitative orientation of his training as a physicist.  He and Heather worked as business and marriage partners to build a particular orientation to public transit studies that embraced his early training as a research physicist and his later work as a UCLA social scientist, the last phase of a peripatetic career through a variety of other research settings.

Raised in New York City, Mr. Mayeda was studying physics at Hobart College in Geneva, New York when he volunteered to join the US Army in 1943.  He became part of the historic all-Japanese 442^nd Regimental Infantry Combat Team.  He joined the Regiment in France on October 30, 1944, part of the requisitioned “replacements” as the 442^nd had just suffered tremendous losses in its successful rescue of the Texas Lost Battalion in the Vosges Mountains.  Mr. Mayeda was an I Company platoon sergeant in Italy, through a campaign along the Apennine Mountains where the 442nd was sent to help protect the Gothic Line.   He was promoted to Technical Sergeant, the then-highest rank that Japanese Americans could achieve.  After the war he returned to resume his studies at Hobart in 1946 and complete his degree in physics.  He would go on to graduate work in physics at George Washington University in College Park, Maryland.

Over the next decade Mr. Mayeda was involved with the work of the National Bureau of Standards in Washington DC, where his project was the hyper-accurate time piece known as the “Atomic Clock”.  He moved with the Bureau to the Naval Ordinance Laboratory in Norco, CA. during the height of the cold war when defense work was decentralized from the eastern seaboard.  This was followed by association with the CIA as a research physicist, managing intelligence research work that led to the development of the SR-71 Blackbird, predecessor of the Stealth Bomber.    Mr. Mayeda was reputedly one of the first children of foreign-born nationals to receive very high levels of security clearance, necessary because of his work decoding data collected from the U-2 high altitude flights of the early 1960’s. 

With the reduction of the defense programs in the late 1960’s, Mr. Mayeda joined the National Library of Medicine where he worked on the development of a computerized data retrieval system MEDLARS which became known as MEDLINE, one of the first searchable databases available to the medical profession.   Traveling from the hard sciences to the social sciences brought him eventually to UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute (NPI) where he designed and led longitudinal data studies on the effects of deinstitutionalization on persons with developmental disabilities,  collecting some of the early data on the impact of the deinstitutionalization policies of the state hospitals during the 1970s and 1980s.   His work in the field of developmental disabilities included management of the reliability studies for the then ground-breaking CDER, Client Development Evaluation Report, an early California performance measurement tool by which to assess consumers’ adaptation in the community in various behavioral domains.

Through his association with the field of developmental disabilities Mr. Mayeda met Heather Menninger.  She was working at that time for the Federal Department of Health and Human Services on community adaptation of de-institutionalized individuals, leading to work with the California State Department of Developmental Services on community-level transportation for a Caltrans-funded study. 

With his first wife, Patricia R. Mayeda whom he married in 1958, he raised four children in Ontario, California: Carol Mayeda, Timothy Mayeda, Mikko Mayeda, and Christopher Mayeda. 

He married Heather Menninger in 1982 and had his fifth child, Hana Mayeda, who was born in 1987 when he was 62 years of age.  Mr. Mayeda died in February 2003 in Claremont, California at the age of 77.