"Inclusive Transportation" with Veronica O. Davis, PE

Island Press' "Inclusive Transportation" arrived at the right time. Veronica continues to be the one of the most insightful and inspiring voices in transportation.

I have to admit, right away, that I didn’t own a copy of Inclusive Transportation until I attended Transportation Camp 2024. It’s not because the great folks at Island Press didn’t send along a copy and an invite to talk to its esteemed author. It’s because I had to give it to my mom to read, and she’s now (hopefully) passed it along to someone in her network, and so on. I did buy a copy, too—but that’s been sent on to a friend in Austin—which is within traffic’s distance to Veronica’s current stomping grounds in Houston, where she currently serves as the city’ “Director of Transportation & Drainage Operations” inside Houston’s Public Works Department. It’s a big job and I can’t think of anyone better to lead the future of one of our biggest city’s mobility and accessibility options than Veronica.

The book's full title is Inclusive Transportation: A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities. The idea here is not contentious: we’ve, as a country, broken the connections that bind communities, and we need a pathway forward to not only leap over this chasm but also a way back across. That’s assuming there ever was a “here” amongst the many “theres.”

I’m proud to have spent an hour with Veronica O. Davis, PE—and I hope that you’ll get that sense from the below transcript, which has been edited for clarity and length.

Use the code “EXASPERATED” for 25% off your purchase! Thanks to Island Press for helping to set up this interview and for being the best and most prolific publisher in the urbanism/transportation space!

---

My name is Veronica O. Davis—my preference for my name is to either write it like that, or you can I add the “PE,” [Ed. Professional Engineer—the credential represents a long process whose reward is tied to project approvals, for one. This is much more applicable than AICP, which is mostly useless.] I prefer the “O,” because there are other “Veronica Davises” out there.

I am the Director of Transportation and Drainage Operations for the City of Houston. 

The book is completely independent of my job, so this whole conversation is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the City. 

Before this job, I owned my own company for 11 years, with a really good friend called Nspiregreen; before that, I worked as an engineer and at the Federal Government. The book is a compilation of my experiences and my thoughts about my experiences, before coming to Houston.

Could give us a little summary of the book and why you decided to write it now?

The title of the book is Inclusive Transportation: A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities. 

The intended audience of the book, when I was writing, was people up-and-coming in the industry. It could be used as a college curriculum, for young planners and young engineers in the transportation industry, and also for journalists to guide how they write about transportation,

People felt like it's been very accessible. So I've had a lot of lay people—regular citizens—email me, thanking me for explaining a lot of the different transportation concepts so that they now feel empowered and understand why these things are important. 

I don't get into the history of how we got here today—I feel like that is very well documented. If people want they can read that well-documented history. I focus more on how we do transportation planning and where it can be problematic; the engagement process and the planning process and how they don't intersect. They're independent processes where everyone ends up frustrated, even in some of the simplest cases. I talk about the different types of stakeholders and end with a call to action. 

My call to advocates in this space is what they can do with the task ahead. Sometimes we can get focused on the one project and we forget about the bigger picture of what's happening across the nation. Laws that are slowly being passed in different places are a test for making sure we're thinking about the long haul as we move forward. 

One of the things I loved about the book was the intentionality of each chapter: you asked us to imagine or envision a scenario or think about how we approach one-on-one conversations about a certain project or topic. Is that something that you wish you had seen in books growing up or was there another reason for structuring the book that way?

A book that I keep by my bedside is called Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. It's not just because I want to be a millionaire—the bigger point of the book is finding your purpose and finding your brain trust to help you live your purpose. The structure of the book is, “Let me give you some ideas. Let me give you a case study. Now you sit and reflect and do some work.” I liked that type of structure of a book because it then becomes the book that sits by your desk that you're like, “Okay, let me go back to this chapter. Let me go back to this activity,” versus other books where you pull a couple of quotes out and then you throw it on the bookshelf or way on that side of the office.

I wanted my book to be that book that’s just as important as the NACTO Design Guidelines, that sits on your desk, that you're constantly going back to reflect. Another one is the Steven Covey book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which again, has got these different little activities so you can read it all the way through, then go back to one chapter, depending on where you are, depending on what you're working on. I also wanted to allow the reader to reflect on their thoughts before they hear my thoughts. In chapter two, regarding equity: “Before I cloud your thoughts, I want you to take the time and tell me what you think…” It was to just give people an opportunity to pause and think about these things, because a lot of times in this world, everything becomes so automatic that we don't ever take the time to pontificate.

A lot of rote engagement that we do is because the federal government mandates that we do it or people see it as a way to shortcut project development. What does engagement mean to you and where do you think we need to go with it in the future?

Chapter Four was probably one of my favorite chapters to write; I did not write my book in order. Chapter Four was the second chapter that I wrote and probably poured my heart and soul into it. Part of it was looking at the different stakeholders. 

One of the challenges with engagement is: if you have a public meeting in a somewhat stale elementary school gym, we know who's going to show up. It's the fringe people; it's the naysayers and the people who want nothing to do with this project and want it to go away. And then you have the champions who want the project. 

This meeting becomes a yelling match between these two groups, and, as a planner, you're trying to balance. If you don't do the project, one group is upset and if you do the project, the other group’s upset and you're just trying to figure out how to get the project done. And that's a challenge because even as these two groups are going at it, there is a group of people that I call “the silently suffering” that are just always left out of the conversation and not thought about. So when people say, “People don't bike,” …yes, they do. There are people in every city who bike because they have no other choice or no other option. 

When I worked on on a plan in DC, we interviewed providers of services to the unhoused populations, because they all bike—they do have jobs, maybe not a W2 job, but they do have jobs—and they're often biking to those jobs. They're not seen because they are not biking during the traditional rush hours. They're biking midday. That's what gets missed in the conversation: everyone's coming at it from their point of view, which is going to traditionally be those nine-to-fivers. During COVID people teleworked and many are still doing a hybrid schedule, it's changed things a little bit, too. 

That's the thing about engagement—it's hard to reach the silently suffering because they are just trying to survive day-to-day, and they don't have the privilege of being able to sit in a meeting at night, because they may be working a second job, or they're still on the shift of their first job, or they're trying to take care of kids or trying to get homework done. 

One of the things I discovered in a public meeting is to make sure you have a building that doesn't require an ID to enter. All those little things become barriers to people. It's hard to reach that group if they aren’t reachable,

I share in the book that we had a bus project and we looked at the data to see where were people getting off the bus at different times of the day. At the PM peak, as people were leaving their downtown work we caught people for about two minutes because that's all you get—two minutes. 

Structuring the meeting to be two minutes long, or at least being able to hand them information that they could look at later, was new. But then also looking at weekends connect to shift workers, making sure you have people that speak different languages, so that you can communicate with different groups. 

When you look at that particular project, we almost got it perfect—maybe not perfect, but almost a good reflection of the broader community in that sample. That was very intentional. That was not a meeting in an elementary basement. That was a meeting literally at the bus stop, and there was no way to miss this meeting because you stepped off the bus and we were at the bus stop. 

Why do you think this is such a challenging concept for younger planners and engineers?

The challenge for younger planners and engineers is actually the older planners and engineers.

Younger planners, especially this young group that is coming out of undergrad and grad school, have been connected for their entire lives.  I'm from the beginning of the Internet generation. I was in the first generation where everyone had Internet coming into college. But this generation—they've been connected. They've had phones their whole life; they've had Snapchat and TikTok. They don't Google for answers anymore. This young generation, they're relying on TikTok and YouTube. 

Their communication patterns are different, and their view of the world is different. They are of all means, they are more open to the world, but they're also not getting driver's licenses at nearly the same rate as we did, They don't want to drive; they have a different desire for the world. I don't think they're the problem. 

I think it's my generation and older that are the problem. Because we are so used to checking a box, ”We had our meeting, we had our open house, we had our poster boards. Here are all the boards and the meeting summary.” 

At Nspiregreen, we did a lot to shift that mindset of, “Hey, we can do this differently.” We worked with our clients to have a street meeting. It was a big deal. But we showed financially that it was significantly cheaper to have a meeting on the street corner than it is to have in a community room. Because if you're on the street corner, the amount of advertising and all that you have to do is a lot different because people are going to happen upon it. You’ll use some resources because you do have to have enough people there. But even when you calculate the cost of that outreach, it is still significantly cheaper than having an actual public meeting in a stale elementary school gym.

How do we use some of the learnings and teachings in Inclusive Transportation to help people get into that mindset you’ve described?

My young planners and engineers love going out and doing pop-up meetings and pop-up bike lanes and like all types of art projects.

That said, some of the challenges include understanding the history of the place that you're going into because while we're looking at the existing conditions today as the physical conditions, there is tension in the community that you don't know until you get in there. What you come to realize is—no one really cared about the bike lanes. It was never about the bike lanes. It was just the one thing that people felt like they could fight: 

I can't fight this development, I can't fight that the world is changing around me, I can't fight that I am nostalgic for what this place used to be.

I can’t fight all the people who have been lost, but I can fight against this one thing. You realize it's not even about the bike lane, and that changes the approach to how you do the project. 

I even have a project now in Houston where we're going to have to take a pause, because, while we're trying to ask very simple things, the tension in the community is a distraction. And until we address that, you just can't get there even though it's a simple project, with a simple solution. You’ve really got to get in there and let people just have it out and get it out. Otherwise, people are holding on to this tension so tightly, that if you don't address it, they are just going to dig in.

This is true for any community, regardless of ethnicity or income. Sometimes you have to have a pause. But sometimes you’ve just got to keep moving forward, let's just be real. Sometimes I’ll make a decision and let everything fall where it lies. And I know it can be challenging, and it can feel contradictory, but I've had to make very hard decisions and say, “I still think this is the right thing to do. We can do more engagement, but it’s a stalemate at this point.” And we just have to make a decision and live with that decision. There's nothing else to compromise. We've compromised everything we can and we have done everything we can. But we just have to make a decision. Someone's going to be mad, right?

That’s one of the things you learn as you grow in this career—I learned it from Rina Cutler [Ed. RIP to one of our best]. She was once at the City of Philadelphia and she said to me, “You're looking for consent, not consensus,” which is a really hard thing. You're never going to get 100% of the people behind you. So where's your cutoff point? That has to do with your relationship with the community, which you can't just have, you have to build, even if you're from a place, you have to build because you don't know everybody. It's very time-consuming, but it's worth it.

And then it gets back to the silently suffering. While everyone again is debating this up here, there are people who need that thing, because they are using it every day. And you don't see them because they are again moving at a time that you just aren't going to see them if you’re not looking.

Roger Millar at WashDOT has this heuristic that he uses to show what happens when you shortcircuit a real engagement process: Design, Display, Defend. Without even trying to understand the community's problems, you'll come in with a project and you'll say, “Here you go, this is for you, you'll like it.” 

I interpret this as meaning that DDD is a backward way to build. And you're you're opening yourself up to lawsuits, very time-consuming litigious processes that you really can't defend. A mediator or judge might ask you, “What outreach did you do here? Get this out of my courtroom.” And you say, “I held a public meeting at elementary school number two,” they're going to respond, “Who attended” and you're just going to be left flat-footed. And all for the sake of…what are we doing?

I think there's also a big gap between how local communities and local cities, towns, and villages, approach transportation versus how state DOTs do, and I think that it is important to be clear because I think a naysayer for a local project is a lot different than a naysayer for the highway project. The level of impact is significantly different. Highways are very destructive, point blank; expanding a highway is destructive. Building a new highway is destructive, full stop. 

Being in Houston, it’s important to have a relationship with TxDOT, so let me pick on other states. I’ve worked in South Carolina, I've worked in Virginia, Maryland, DC, Pennsylvania, and Michigan and the common theme of every state is the city has a different vision and philosophy than the state. And I don't know how you bridge that gap. Because you do have the Roger Millars of the world who think at a different level. But many of our colleagues don't, they are still very: “There's going to be a million people here in the future and we need to make sure that a million people can move smoothly through this area.” Regardless of what destruction comes. A hundred people might lose their homes, but that's all right, because there's the greater good of international commerce, right? 

We say the benefit outweighs the cost. But often, because of where the highways are, it's the same communities impacted over and over again. So I just want to make sure that the distinction is very clear. 

The state has the money, the community has a vision. And that's where organizations like the National Association of City Transportation Officials flourish. They said, “We don't want to design to these highway standards.” And I'm really thankful to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which officially recognizes NACTO standards. There’s been a bone of contention: “It's local money, do whatever you want, but it’s Federal money, you build to AASHTO standards,” but AASHTO standards aren't meeting our needs!

I don't need a 12-foot lane, in the middle of downtown, or the middle of a community.

A “Road Diet.” People get SO MAD. Source.

How do we actually move forward to get our states to embrace and accept that standard? Because often state DOTs or other state agencies have some type of a role in building or overseeing Federally-funded projects. 

I want to make it crystal clear that I'm not anti highways—the highways that exist have their place. The way we do highway planning and engineering is problematic because we look at things through one mode, and we never look to say, “Oh, could we run rail down the middle of the highway? Could we run a bus rapid transit down the middle of the highway?” Nope, we can do some HOV lanes or we can expand this way or put something on top. And I think that's where highway planning hasn’t evolved to a place where we need it to evolve.

What does inclusivity actually mean? It means different voices, the silently suffering—you often learn the most when you find who needs the most. And they'll be candid with you, they'll tell you, if you ask people, they'll tell you what their problems are. And you have to ask them in a way where you develop trust. 

“Oh, inclusiveness. Oh, we can't forget about our rural areas,” I’ll hear. Okay, cool. Let's talk about the rural areas, because they have the same issues that the cities have in terms of impact, and you're saying these communities are impacted over and over again. Folks will hold rural communities up as a dig at the urban areas, but these same folks are not even meeting rural needs! ,

I worked on a project in Maryland, and one of the big things in rural areas is an aging population whose only way to get around is by driving. There's a community in California that's experimenting with on-demand transit to serve these rural communities so that as people age, they can stay on the farm that's been in the family for X number of years. 

Folks in rural areas will say: “We have to expand our roads because our population is doubling.” But it’s doubling from 400 to 800… how does that impact your roads? In their mind, it's “We have all these people coming and we need to make it so that everyone can drive their car.” But you also have a population that is aging in your rural communities and they're not going to be able to drive in five years. How do they get around? It is very isolating.

What does a successful future look like in your eyes?

A successful future looks like a community where a 10-year-old can independently navigate the community and get to where they need to—school, parks, maybe some ice cream. If we can build communities, not just cities, but if we can build communities for children, all the other things fix themselves.

Yeah, we just have to prioritize it and tell stories, right? We can have all the data that we want and we can collect as much information as we want. But if we can't tell a story about why it's important and who should care about this and include different people's voices in that storytelling, we're nowhere. 

Are you optimistic?

I am, yeah.

I ask that question everybody and sometimes people say no. I'm more optimistic than I used to be when I started this newsletter because of talking to people like you and changemakers all across the country trying to make a difference.

Did you ever have pimples when you were a teenager? And you get the medication? The doctor says it's going to get worse before it gets better.

We're in this moment right now—transportation just gets caught in the political conversation. We're in a period of strife. We're in a period of fight; people are holding on and digging down, and you see it across every city where no, you shall not touch my parking, you shall not take away a lane of traffic, you shall not do all these things. 

What we will see with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, once those projects start getting completed, we will see a shift. My optimism will also depend on what comes next. If we can continue that type of thinking at the Federal level, we can get to a better place. 

There's a War on Cars, and insurance companies are going to be the dark horse in the War on Cars, because at the end of the day, insurance companies don't really want to pay, that's not the goal; the goal is to collect your premium and make money off of the interest. That is the business model. 

“I'm [Ed. The insurance company] continuously having to pay, because you [Ed. Drivers in cars] keep killing people, this ain't gonna work.” I do see them now stepping up with research—we're going to get to a point where it's a “change or be changed” type situation. We'll get there. 

It’s going to take time to get over the hump. 

If you think about the Civil Rights Movement, people can be like, “Oh, well, Rosa Parks sat down and then there was a Civil Rights Movement…” No, this was decades—we’re talking about 40 years just to get to 1965. We have to remember that we have to chip away little by little at these things.

---

Exasperated Infrastructures is a reader-supported labor of love. Please consider upgrading to a monthly or yearly subscription or gifting a subscription to a friend or colleague to help me dedicate more of my time to bring you these great interviews, reviews, short- and long-form pieces, and collaborations. I try to keep all newer posts free to read and if there’s an older post you’re interested in, please email me at samuel.b.sklar@gmail.com and I’ll give you access. The ultimate goal is to inform and foster community.

The best thing you can do to support the newsletter (except, you know, money) is to share this post with everyone you know.