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Diversity and Inclusion for Transportation Professionals

Diversity and Inclusion for Transportation Professionals

How diverse teams can plan, design, operate, and maintain better transportation systems

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By Mariam Bello, City of Calgary

The first time I ever considered how my lived experience would guide my practice as an engineer was in university. I was attending the Conference on Diversity in Engineering (CDE), an annual event organized by member schools of the Canadian Federation of Engineering Students, and I found myself in a one-on-one conversation with a speaker whose session I particularly enjoyed earlier that day. The part of the conversation I remember most clearly is when she looked me in the eye and told me that when I graduate and enter the workforce, at some point, the going would get tough. And when that would happen, she very sincerely and passionately asked me to not give up because the industry would need me to ensure that the perspectives and experiences of women (and particularly women of colour) were being considered in whatever discipline I ended up practicing. An example I remember her sharing is that perhaps, someday, I would find myself in a room of engineers who were deciding on streetlight spacing and my lived experience could help me advocate for standards that made women feel more secure and have a safer experience when walking down the street at night.

Before that conversation, I never really considered how the diversity of lived experiences on technical teams could lead to better outcomes for projects. I used to only think of diversity in the workplace as being necessary to create a fair and just environment, especially when it came to fair access to opportunity. This came from many personal experiences of not seeing people who looked like me at tables where important decisions are made and of feeling isolated and uncomfortable as the only person of a different identity in professional settings. But my experience at CDE was the first time I started to think of diversity as a strength that could provide a significant benefit to everyone on the team and result in better project outcomes. In recent years, there have been many discussions and initiatives related to diversity and inclusion (D&I) in workplaces. Many organizations today list D&I as one of their core values and there is data to support that diverse workplaces tend to perform better in a variety of ways. Studies have found that companies that have more diverse management teams (as seen through the lenses of gender, ethnicity, culture, age, and life experience) tended to financially outperform, be more innovative, and have higher rates of productivity when compared to companies with less diverse leadership.

In the transportation industry, diverse lived experiences can help practitioners consider how different users will experience mobility networks and services. When it comes to developing a specific transportation solution, there is no substitute for firsthand knowledge of the problem. Every practitioner has a lifetime’s worth of experiences in making trips but different groups of people use the same transportation system differently—for different purposes, from different origins, to different destinations, and with different constraints. Having lived experience as a low-income individual and “captive” transit user can give a transit planner a different perspective on the optimization of transit operations and transit network connectivity. Having experience travelling with a disability (personally or with someone close to you) can also make a transportation engineer more acutely aware of all of the ways that street design and maintenance may create barriers for people with disabilities. These are just some examples to highlight how having workforces that better reflect the communities we seek to serve improves our ability to plan, design, operate, and maintain transportation networks and services that meet the needs of more members of the community.

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For this article, I had the opportunity to talk to four currently practicing transportation professionals who shared some anecdotes about how their identity and personal experiences have impacted their practice.

Improving the technical working environment for everyone

As a woman of colour and a professional still in the early part of her career, Shara Viaje, P.Eng., has noticed how her presence in a meeting can change the atmosphere—in a good way.

In Shara’s experience, simply being in the room can subconsciously remind others that not everyone has the same experience, expertise, or understanding of an issue as them. This often leads speakers to make a more conscious effort to explain their points better, create a more inclusive dialogue, and expect questions or feedback from others who may not see or understand something in the same way as them. This also often results in more frequent sharing of knowledge which benefits everyone in the room.

Shara thinks that encouraging diverse representation in leadership allows for more significant opportunities to generate discussions that cover a broader spectrum. With more people speaking up and sharing their opinions, teams are enriched with more perspectives that help make better-informed decisions.

Shara representing diversity in transportation at an elementary school visit to talk about tunnels and LRTs Matthew at a City of Toronto event

Using lived experience to drive community improvement projects

Matthew Davis, P.Eng., PE, PTOE, FITE, has a passion for engineering solutions that improve equity and it stems from his time growing up in a small town in New Jersey. As a high school student, he lived on the south side of train tracks that ran through his town and had to walk across them every day to get to school on the north side. Frequent trains on those tracks served a nearby oil refinery and often, these long trains would stop in town, blocking Matthew’s ability to get to school. The issue was so frequent that the train conductor would sometime give students “late passes” to show in school when they didn’t show up on time. Matthew noticed that most of his peers who lived on the south side and had to deal with this issue looked like him and knew that there was a reason for this. Many communities in the US have a history of redlining, a historic discriminatory policy that classified areas where people of color lived as high risk and denied them federally-backed mortgages. This impacted people’s ability to build generational wealth through house ownership and prevented people from moving, leading to segregated neighborhoods that persist to this day. Many historically Black communities in the US are located near train tracks, highways, landfills, and other undesirable features due to the long-lasting impacts of redlining, even though the policy is no longer legal or enforced. Even as a high

school student, Matthew wanted to use an engineering solution—installing a grade separated crossing—to right this wrong.

Today, Matthew is the Manager of Capital Projects and Programs with Transportation Services at the City of Toronto. In this role, Matthew leverages his over 20 years of technical experience and applies an equity lens to investment decisions to enable more equitable outcomes across the city.

Empathetic transportation planning for better outcomes

Victor Ngo, RPP, MCIP recalls a project that he connected with personally and that ultimately helped him cultivate a sense of “mindful practice” as a transportation professional of colour and an ally.

During Victor’s involvement as a transportation consultant on a proposed development in the neighbourhood he lives in, he heard feedback from many community members about the project. This led to a realization that the proposed development would disproportionately impact a community of colour and cause potential harm as it would eliminate a key spot for the community to access important ethnic food options. Victor’s lived experience and identity made the realization feel even more significant.

Although the scope of his work on the particular project didn’t enable him to make decisions that could address the community’s concerns, the experience led him to reflect on the relationship between his work, his identity, and his personal values. Today, he is more intentional about how his actions might affect communities and tries to navigate a balance between his obligations to high-quality professional practice, to the public, to allied communities of colour, and to his clients.

Victor presenting at the CITE 2019 Annual Conference in Ottawa

Being a champion for change

For Stephanie McNeely, P.Eng., advocating for diversity comes from her personal experiences of exclusion. Stephanie remembers being in the early stages of her career, when she was “energetic, idealistic and ready to change the world.” That’s why it stung when she noticed that most of her predominantly male co-workers would stealthily disappear at lunchtime a couple of times a month and discovered that they were intentionally excluding her to have time for a “bonafide boys club.”

Now, as the Director of Surface Infrastructure in the Tram Project Office at Société de transport de l’Outaouais (STO), Stephanie tries to use her leadership role and privilege for good. She makes an effort to pay more attention to diverse (and sometimes quieter) voices on her team and tries to be a good ally by actively checking her biases and helping open doors to bring others through with her. She is convinced that when there are more diverse voices, those voices make it easier to challenge the status quo of engineering practices that no longer make sense and to develop better transportation solutions.

Stephanie enjoying the great outdoors

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Embrace the benefits of diversity

Having pitched the idea for this piece on my own, I admit that I felt some apprehension about the message that I could unintentionally convey. It was never my intention to write a piece that attempts to argue why I and other practitioners who find themselves in the minority deserve to have a seat on the table. I believe that this type of conversation should never need to happen. We have many great attributes to bring to the teams we work with, including our intelligence, skills, and professional experience, none of which are directly related to our identity or lived experience.

But at the same time, I think it’s important to appreciate and celebrate the value of the perspectives that transportation professionals representing minority groups in the industry can bring. This includes practitioners with lived experiences related to race, ability, age, gender, sexuality, income, class, and more. We all have much to learn from each other and the unique experiences that happen to us outside of work can make us better engineers, planners, and technicians. And each of us has a responsibility to consciously make efforts to build teams that better reflect the communities we are trying to improve so that we can see the benefits of diversity on the work we produce.

Mariam Bello, P.Eng. is a transportation engineer who helps build vibrant streets for everyone with the Liveable Streets division at the City of Calgary. Her public and private sector experience includes long-range mobility planning, functional design of complete streets, and strategic and operational transit planning. We’ll be exploring the topics of diversity and inclusion in the transportation profession at the CITE/QUAD Joint 2022 Annual Conference in Vancouver with two dedicated sessions.

BIPOC Roundtable

Monday, May 30 | 10:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. This session will be a safe space for attendees who identify as BIPOC to discuss current and emerging issues faced in the profession.

Diversity & Inclusion Roundtable

Wednesday, June 1 | 8:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. An open-invitation session for all delegates to delve into diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism leadership within the transportation field.

Join us for these important conversations and help shape CITE’s efforts to support diversity & inclusion in the transportation profession

Register at conference. cite7.org

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