SSTI Annual Meeting Highlights: Transportation leaders tackle cultural change and sustainability

By Chris McCahill, Megan Link, and Eric Murphy

Top officials from 14 state DOTs gathered in St. Paul, Minnesota, earlier this month for SSTI’s annual meeting, where they shared innovative ideas through roundtable discussions, tours, and informal networking. These connections help officials bring solutions back to their home states. 

The benefit of the meeting, according to one participant, is “understanding what other agencies are doing, what other commissioners or CEOs are working on, what their difficulties are, so we’re not in this alone. Instead of reinventing the wheel, this is a way of making those connections on a deeper level.” Learning how another agency has accomplished similar tasks is “really important for us to be able to improve our process,” they added.  

Our community of practice encourages frank and candid discussion on everyday challenges, while offering opportunities to connect more closely with peers through informal networking. Officials swapped family stories and ribbed each other over football rivalries, before tackling the heavier conversations about issues such as changing paradigms and “stroads.” Here are some key takeaways and resources from those discussions. 

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Planning for an Uncertain Future 

In framing this discussion, our staff recalled an NCHRP study from 2014 that looked at future travel demand under four different scenarios. Depending on the scenario, the amount an average person drives in 2050 could range from a slight increase to a decrease of as much as 50%. Meeting participants then considered a wide range of unknown factors and asked themselves: Which factors can we influence? And how can we prepare for the unknown? 

Actual travel demand compared to future travel demand under several scenarios developed for Impacts 2050. Source: NCHRP Report 750, Vol. 6.

Several themes emerged from the discussion. First, whether we are interested in travel demand, revenues, or extreme weather events, it is becoming increasingly difficult to rely on past trends to explain future needs.  Second, given the uncertainty about future conditions, state agencies are faced with making investments that offer the most benefit regardless of how the future plays out. In some cases, that means investing in more resilient infrastructure. In other cases, it means designing roads that are flexible in meeting a wide range of needs, including people who might walk, bike, or rely on transit.  

Finally, DOT officials reflected on their role as public stewards—in less predictable times, building according to values can help make progress toward the outcomes they want, regardless of the future scenario. This was an especially salient question for those states with ambitious climate goals. Historically, state DOTs have focused on anticipating and meeting travel demand—an approach known as “predict and provide.” This has fed into a vicious cycle that many characterize as “induced demand.”  This points to a need for better models, but also a candid recognition that models alone do not provide the answers. 

As an example, participants imagined investing in a new bridge and weighing the decision to include a multiuse trail. A traditional approach might suggest the demand isn’t there. Several participants noted, however, that it was the right values-based decision, despite some potential challenges. As Brent Toderian, the former chief planner in Vancouver, Canada, is often credited with saying, “You can’t justify a bridge by counting the number of people swimming across a river.” 

Cultivating New Paradigms 

As with most SSTI meetings, culture change was a central theme. Among the challenges of meeting new demands—especially around sustainability and equity—is a need to attract new talent while retaining the skilled and knowledgeable workforce that exists. 

Some agencies, we learned, struggle to fill traditional engineering roles, while others are in desperate need of data scientists and other emerging roles. In either case, however, they usually rely on incentives beyond competitive pay (unlike in the private sector) to attract and retain skilled team members.  

Some agencies, for instance, have had better luck attracting young engineers in niche roles like “active transportation.” By reviewing the descriptions of other positions, some agency leaders feel they can attract more talent while instilling a culture that promotes active transportation on every project. Hiring managers have also used the interview process to gauge people’s interest in working for the agency with questions like: “Could you describe your last trip using public transportation?” Others conduct “stay interviews,” in addition to exit interviews, to understand what people enjoy about their job, especially in cases when people return to the agency after working for a period in the private sector. 

DOT officials are sitting around an L-shaped table talking to each other.
Photo credit: Eric Murphy

Agencies have also taken a closer look at their internal structure to make better use of the capacity they already have. Some have empowered interns with meaningful projects and regularly check in with other junior staff to set them on course for full-time employment or other opportunities for career advancement. Other agencies have begun to relax their licensing requirements in certain roles, including management and data analytics, to free up qualified Professional Engineers (PEs) for the necessary design work. 

Finally, agency leaders often point to remote work as a means to stand out from private sector employers, while acknowledging the added challenges it creates. As one agency leader noted, the ability to work from home does not mitigate the need for designers to step into the field to understand the context and experience the physical conditions of the projects on which they are working. 

Repurposing Orphan Highways and “Stroads” 

Regardless of what they are called, every state agency is faced with roads that once moved people in and out of metropolitan areas but have since outlived their original purpose. Many are now what some consider “stroads,” which combine features of a street (serving neighborhoods and commercial activities) and a road (moving cars quickly from point A to point B). Like a futon—part bed and part couch—stroads typically serve neither function well. And they often create some of the most dangerous corridors in the country. 

To kick off our annual meeting, participants toured the Olson Memorial Highway, a similar type of corridor in Northern Minneapolis that divided a once-vibrant community and now features two of the state’s most dangerous intersections. Setting the tone for later discussions, MnDOT staff discussed the area’s history, redevelopment plans, and engagement strategies. Prior to receiving a Reconnecting Communities grant, the Minnesota DOT had already implemented temporary traffic-calming measures to reduce speeds and improve pedestrian crossings on the six-lane road. They have also prioritized robust community engagement, knocking on neighbors’ doors to ensure diverse voices are heard in the planning process. 

Photo credit: Chris McCahill

During our group discussion, participants lamented the challenges in fixing these broken roads—the biggest one being cultural resistance to change. Participants noted that overcoming community opposition to road diets often requires education and patience, especially since the resistance typically comes from through-travelers rather than local residents. Temporary installations like those along the Olson Memorial Highway (and a similar quick-build project featured in Connecticut last year) can go a long way in building support. But their success also depends on strong partnerships with local communities and other agencies, and a commitment to learning and educating. One participant reminded us of a lesson learned from the book Subtract: it takes an open mind to consider removing something, rather than adding something, as a viable solution to a problem. 

Finally, participants also looked inward to the obstacles their own agencies often must work through. Many of these challenges are cultural, but many are technical. For engineers, encouraging flexibility in road design, moving away from “checkbox engineering,” and interrogating the purpose of each project can help move toward more purposeful design and projects. But this also requires changes to guidelines and priorities. Moving away from level-of-service as a performance measure (a topic we recently wrote about) and moving toward principles like multimodal accessibility, can make it easier to trade vehicle throughput for improved crossings and safer speeds.  

Florida’s context sensitive design manual was praised for promoting effective road design and encouraging complementary land use by local governments. The need for balancing street or road design with the surrounding development patterns is obvious along the Olson Memorial Highway, which still experiences excessive speeds, and in similar corridors in other states. 

Driving the Future of Passenger Rail 

Day two of the meeting started with a tour of St. Paul’s Union Depot station, led by officials from MnDOT and Ramsey County. The county and other partners spent nearly $250 million to renovate the building, after it had lain dormant since 1971. It now ties together bus, light rail, and passenger rail service, including the new Borealis train line that launched on May 21 with service to Milwaukee and Chicago. 

As with the Borealis line, coordination and compromise are keys to expanding passenger rail across the country. While each state is different—some states own their rail lines while others play small roles in transit—it can be extremely challenging to find common ground among various freight operators, Amtrak, and local partners. In negotiating with partners, for example, Ramsey County took on considerable risk and added costs to make Borealis a reality. 

In building stronger partnerships, some states are looking with interest toward coalitions like the Northeast Corridor Commission and the Southern Rail Commission, the latter of which brought service to the Gulf Coast after at least a decade of negotiations. These kinds of arrangements, they felt, are especially important to consider given the uncertainty around Amtrak’s operational costs and the piecemeal nature of federal funding through competitive grants.  

Lead photo credit: Eric Murphy