Beth Osborne on the Past, Present and Future of Transportation

My former boss, and current Director of Transportation for America, talks her experience working across the US, fixing our transportation system first, then fixing it better.

Illustration for T4A by Noah MacMillan.

I started my transportation career working for Smart Growth America, a nonpartisan, not-for-profit think tank and consultancy based in DC. For almost two years I was lucky to work with Beth Osborne, now the director of Transportation for America, one of SGA’s many programs dedicated to helping communities help themselves grow, well, smart. The future is coming, and whether the United States crashes its way into freedom or becomes a bastion for climate, equity, and opportunity is entirely up to its 30,000 communities across 50 states, DC, and its territories. Beth and her team at T4A are doing their part to make this transition easier, fairer, and cleaner with willing and ready leaders and ordinary citizens.

It’s from Beth I learned to be a thoughtful policy analyst and a master communicator. She taught me how to turn my schooling into action. My crusade for more effective project selection and measurement is in all honesty Beth’s doing—and I was …