Past Events › Webinar

Today, most state transportation departments find themselves being pulled by two negative forces. First, they are being told to cut staff in order to demonstrate efficiency to the legislature and the public. Secondly, retaining stellar employees is strained by uncompetitive pay scales and competition from the private sector. The Tennessee Department of Transportation believes cutting staff is not necessarily an indicator of efficiency; in fact, it can have the opposite effect and did just that in their state. This webinar will take you through the environment that Commissioner John Schroer and Chief Financial Officer Joe Galbato faced in Tennessee, and more importantly, what they did to combat these forces. The path taken in Tennessee required strong support from the top such as Governor Bill Haslam’s legislation from 2012. We look forward to sharing their story with you.

The common practice of restricting infill development based on its impact on roadway level of service (LOS) has for decades depressed green, efficient compact development and induced energy-intensive, costly sprawl. Now many cities are moving to reform their land-use review process to lessen the emphasis on LOS, and instead to focus on system-wide impacts from development, as measured in vehicle-miles traveled (VMT). One of those cities – Pasadena, Calif. – pioneered the move away from LOS in 2015 and now has several years applying it to projects. (Spoiler alert: That experience is mostly good.) One of the heroes in that reform effort is Pasadena’s DOT director, Fred Dock. He joins us for a webinar that retraces Pasadena’s footsteps in developing the new policy and provides an evaluation based on three years of implementation.

State DOTS are moving toward more transparent, data-driven, and multimodal project prioritization and SSTI invites agency leaders to join the effort. Virginia’s Smart Scale, effective since 2014, prioritizes transportation investments based on six key criteria and a transparent but evolving scoring process. Its goal, according to the agency, is picking the right transportation projects and ensuring the best use of limited tax dollars. The Hawaii DOT more recently piloted its SmartTRAC program and is now learning from that experience to formalize a similar program. SSTI will be reviewing these programs and others over the next year and will be recruiting advisors from interested DOTs and MPOs to ensure this work helps advance their own programs.