Fine 4
In what segment of the public transportation industry will you make a career and why?
Recently my former preschool bricked over the sliding window facing an alley. For years, parents would drive up to the window and get handed their child through the window. I too passed from my mother’s idling car to preschool and back again, not unlike a bank deposit, a load of dry cleaning, a Styrofoam cup of sweet tea, or a six-pack of low-point beer, which are all things you can get handed to you from sliding windows in Ada, Oklahoma, where I grew up. I had great bikes as a kid and I rode them, fervently and too often after dark without lights on, but once I got my drivers license, I left my bike in the garage and entered the civic communion of the line at the drive-thru convenience store.
Only later when I started thinking critically about space did I begin to understand the complications of a built environment in which automobility was the only mobility. As a graduate student in American Studies at Brown, I delved into the history of modern planning, de-centering and suburbanization, deindustrialization, urban political and social movements, transportation policy, and housing policy. Outside of class, I started riding a bike again and making use of RIPTA, commuting throughout Rhode Island on the bike and bus networks. Making use of metropolitan transportation networks, I traveled by commuter rail for the first time, realizing it was cheaper and faster than driving to Boston and New York.
I also become involved in local transportation advocacy and urban planning initiatives. As an intern for Cornish Associates, a New Urbanist firm, I joined efforts to imagine a redevelopment of the central city plaza in Providence, which currently serves as the most important bus terminal in Rhode Island. As one part of this effort, I provided a policy memo to the incoming mayoral administration on the economic benefits of well-planned public spaces. In Providence, I also assisted the Rhode Island Coalition for Transportation Choices, a transportation advocacy group, in research for a senate study commission. This study commission informed RI legislators about the state’s increasingly problematic dependence on gasoline tax revenue to fund public transportation and proposed alternative, more sustainable funding methods.
From my internships, I have a general sense of how transportation systems can be designed more efficiently and how long it might take to make substantial changes in the funding stream of a state transit agency. And those elements—transportation design and transportation finance—will be major parts of my research in graduate school and my career. But I think how intuition plays into transportation choices is also a fascinating subject with the potential for transformative effects. As a Masters student in the Dept. of City and Regional Planning at Berkeley, I aim to explore how public transportation can become a more intuitive choice than driving, and in particular, how technology can be used or improved to make transit an even easier choice. At Berkeley, I plan to join projects that are currently developing ways to use smartphone technology to probe people's travel choices and nudge them towards more sustainable choices. Other research at Berkeley is exploring how transit agencies can interface with Google’s trip planning technology and still preserve agency resources by limiting the need for upkeep from agency staff. In graduate research projects like these, I see the foundation for my professional goals, and I look forward to implementing the products of such research in my professional career.
Because I love planning and not web developing, I see myself in the public sector, working in metropolitan transit agencies as a transportation planner. Broadly, I am committed to mitigating the devastating legacy of unfettered suburbanization, highway building, and urban renewal in the US and the effects of this on transportation. Most central to my career is attending to a now-decaying transportation infrastructure that physically and financially privileged personal automobiles over pedestrian safety, bicycle use, and public transportation and still remains a hindrance to economic revitalization and a drain on the environment. I’ve seen how transportation inequity reinforces socio-spatial and socio-economic inequities as it limits employment opportunities and dampens quality of life. I aim to join those who plan economically sound planning transportation networks that encourage socially equitable and environmentally responsible mobility. Added to this, I see myself as a transportation planner who understands the important relationship between information technology and public transportation, a champion for increased accessibility and legibility of transit schedules, routes, and fares.
I also bring to a career in planning a sympathetic understanding of the people and ingrained cultural values of car-dependent places. Places like these—like the cities in Oklahoma where I grew up—are where the need for responsible planning and infrastructure transformation will continue to be the most acute and where I see myself returning to work. In places like these, where the built environment and prevailing public policy sustains only a particular kind of mobility, driving is intuitive. It’s cheaper, it’s more efficient, but also, it feels natural. To me, these are the three interrelated factors that make up an intuitive transportation choice. Saving time and saving money together play a role in creating an “obvious” choice, but the obviousness of a choice also depends on a less quantifiable sense of comfort, distinct from time and money. While more sustainable funding sources and improved transit design will make public transit a more viable, convenient transportation option, better and more accessible information technology will increase the perception that it is. In my career as a transportation planner in the public sector, I aim to build from this understanding, grow the ridership and infrastructure of public transit, and see to it that transit becomes as intuitive as driving was for me.