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GATEWAY 2018 PUBLISHED BY BUSINESS IN VANCOUVER
PROFILE
PAM RYAN:
ROADWORK AHEAD The founding and managing partner of Lucent Quay Consulting has worked on some of Metro Vancouver’s biggest transportation projects
HAYLEY WOODIN
PAM RYAN FOUNDING AND MANAGER PARTNER, LUCENT QUAY CONSULTING
You have to listen. And I think that really sounds simple, but it’s the hard thing to do
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itting just two city blocks away from Vancouver harbour, Canada Place and North America’s gateway to Asia, Pam Ryan admits that what she’s about to say might seem funny. “I think my entire life has led me to transportation,” muses the founding and managing partner of Lucent Quay Consulting between glances out of the window and toward the water. Next to the harbour is Ryan’s favourite spot in what she calls the best city in the world. Over the course of more than 25 years in the transportation sector, Ryan’s work has had a direct impact on the city and the surrounding region’s transportation landscape, though the consultant, strategist and facilitator sees it as much more than that. “To me it’s fundamental to how people live their life, and to be part of making improvements in how people experience their life, it’s fascinating,” she says. Over her career, Ryan has had a hand in work on the Port Mann Bridge, South Fraser Perimeter Road, Pitt River Bridge and Lions Gate Bridge rehabilitation project, to name a few of the multimillion-dollar initiatives she has lent her expertise to. “Those are generational projects that have made a huge impact in the region,” says Ryan. “Roads bring economic development to impoverished nations. Transit can shape urban communities in amazing ways. The history of Canada is the history of the building of the railroad.” Growing up, Ryan saw a lot of that history. Born and raised (mostly) in Kamloops as part of a big family on a single income, vacations were road trips to destinations in British Columbia. “I think about some of the places that I remember, and they’re all transportation focused,” says Ryan, mentioning trips to see the port – now just a short walk from
her Vancouver office – and the Last Spike driven into the Canadian Pacific Railway in Craigellachie. Her family were also big board game players, and her favourite was Parker Brothers’ Wide World, where players are given a product, a country and a form of transportation and are left to strategize the logistics of goods movement. “All my life I have wanted to go to Valencia to eat an orange,” says Ryan, who crossed that item off her bucket list in 2008 and has since fallen in love with Spain. “All my favourite board games had something to do with transportation. It’s like it’s been in my heart kind of forever. Took my brain a little bit longer to catch up.” Ryan says her brain eventually got there through process of elimination, closing doors to options she learned she didn’t like. Foundational to her career trajectory was her major in transportation and logistics as part of her University of British Columbia (UBC) bachelor of commerce degree. Her studies took place at a time when airline deregulation had just completed, and trucking deregulation was just beginning. “The things we were learning were kind of new and interesting, and we weren’t quite sure how they were going to roll out. That part was really interesting and it really attracted me to the policy side of transportation as
2018-04-03 11:35 AM