By Josh Overstreet
In the morning, it’s likely that you get up, walk to the kitchen, get coffee and get ready for work.You grab your car keys and begin driving toward the office on the same road you use every day.You know which traffic lights are longer or shorter; you know how to avoid traffic hotspots. You don’t give a second thought to your daily transportation, and it’s just automatic. Not so for Alissa Duncan. When Duncan looks at traffic and transportation maps she sees it in the same light as a computer technician sees a motherboard or an artist with an abstract painting. Duncan grew up in Spartanburg, but moved around because her father was a nuclear engineer. She went to the University of South Carolina, where she received a bachelor’s degree in anthropology, but “you can’t do much with a degree in anthropology,” she notes. Moving to New Orleans, she began working as a veterinary technician, then moved back to the Upstate where she continued to work as a veterinary technician with the Humane Society. Eventually she decided to go back to grad school at Clemson for a degree in city and regional planning, during which she interned with SPATS (or Spartanburg Area Transportation Study, the transportation focus of Spartanburg County Planning and
Development), and most recently served as their sustainability planner. Through SPATS, where she focused on air quality, regional transportation, sustainability, transit, and bicycle and pedestrian facilities, she became involved with InnoMobility, a conference that brings together businesses, entrepreneurs and planners who are creating the next innovations in transportation and transportation systems. After being at the conference, Alissa wanted to see it expand from a predominantly automobile-focused event and include other areas such as bicycles and pedestrian transportation. Through this desire and through InnoMobility, she met Sue Zielinski, the managing director of SMART at the University of Michigan. The program seeks to connect all the transportation assets and leaders of a community and begin to plan on how to use every bit of transportation and transportation technology in the smartest, most innovative and most efficient way possible. “SMART is about equity in transportation. It’s about choices, economic development; it’s about connections,” she says. “In order to gain all of those things to make a connective system have to include lots of different stakeholders.” Based on Zielinski’s model
and mentoring, Alissa formed SMART Upstate, and through a memorandum of understanding she united SPATS, its Greenville counterpart GPATS, and the Appalachian Council of Governments in order to cover both rural and urban transportation in the Upstate. At the first meeting 25 people from all different sectors in the Upstate—public, to private, to nonprofit, entrepreneurs and business leaders—held a mapping session in which they created a map of the transportation infrastructure in order to know what they were working with. “So what the agreed upon solution to that was to create a website that has all of the infrastructure listed for Greenville and Spartanburg for transportation that anybody can see and can be interactive.” The mapping process also showed current gaps in the Upstate’s transportation infrastructure such as lack of transportation for seniors and undocumented persons. Another is the air quality which has teetered on the brink of okay to now being an issue with ozone pollution increasing. “That’s because of all the single occupancy vehicles, not carpooling, or taking a bus...and it’s putting a lot of pollution into the air.”
But Alissa doesn’t just want to fill in the gaps. Instead, she wants to create a transportation environment in the Upstate that will catch national attention. “My long term vision is to see the Upstate as a transportation hub,” she said,“We have so many assets here in terms of transportation and a lot of bright, young, and vibrant minds ready to go and work on it.” However, this new direction isn’t without its own challenges— the biggest being that people are not going to easily give up what they are already used to. “As a public sector employee I see people are very married to what they normally do and what they are used to doing.” Still, with the added benefits of better and better transportation and innovation, people may be hard pressed to stick to established ways. Alissa said that the better ways a business can transport goods and services as well as improved ways for people to travel to places of business can only be a good thing for economic growth. Having recently joined economic group Ten at the Top, Duncan is poised to make a huge impact across the Upstate. “Transportation and economic development are intrinsically linked. If you have better transportation, you have better economic development.”
Q1 2013 // Business Black Box
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How you get back and forth to work, home, and shopping probably isn’t something you think about a lot. But while most of us are on autopilot as soon as we hit the car, Alissa Duncan cares about every detail in how you get to work every day. After all, it’s her job to figure out how you’re going to get there tomorrow.