Eulois Cleckley on the Past, Present and Future of Transportation

Talking communication, regional cooperation, and freight planning with the Executive Director at the newly reorganized Denver Department of Transportation and Infrastructure.

I had the opportunity to chat with Denver’s transportation chief, Eulois Cleckley, a few months ago. The conversation, lightly edited for clarity, is below.

Director Cleckley has combined his years of government and private sector experience to reassemble the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure to lead the city and its suburbs into the future—with a special focus on building literal and metaphorical bridges between communities.

He’s also focused on the movement of freight throughout Denver, which is a subject rarely taught in schools and even harder to learn on the job, because so much of the current modus operandi in transportation planning is moving people—mode agnostic—but certainly not in trucks. It’s commendable and perhaps we’ll see Denver become a national example for future freight planning.

Lastly, we talked about communicating better by changing the expectation among staff and trickling that same expectation into communities, so that we’re not planning at people,…