Shoshana Lew on the Past, Present and Future of Transportation

Colorado DOT's Executive Director dishes on challenges unique to the Centennial State and how driving a snowplow is, in fact, every little girl's dream.

I’ve been fortunate to interview some of the finest minds in transportation in my 3+ years of writing Exasperated Infrastructures. It’s been one of my life’s greatest pleasures, so far, to connect ideas from people in the know to people in the want-to-know. I love telling stories and sharing ideas; it’s the bedrock for a seismic shift in approach.

Through happenstance, I was able to get an hour of Shoshana Lew’s time. She walked me through how Colorado works similarly and differently to other state DOTs. We talked about structural diversity—making sure the agency looks like the people it serves; we also talked about infrastructural diversity—Colorado’s places are spaced differently and range in size differently than some other states’ places. How does this affect funding? How does it affect operations?

Director Lew told me this:

You get to say no a lot running a state DOT if you’re any good at it.

But what she does say yes to—often—is shaping one of the most dynamic DOTs in the United States; what works in tight corridors has a chance of working in broader corridors everywhere. The constraint has become the beacon for new ideas: I swear to you there’s room for a sidewalk.

Essentially what you’re getting here is a peek inside the brain of one of our finest transportation leaders, all for the price of a free subscription and a share.

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My name is Shoshana Lew, I'm the Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Transportation and have been for over four years at this point—time flies. I came to this space from a career that straddled infrastructure, broader land use issues and government finance, and climate policy. When I think about the transportation sector right now, we need to balance how people move, why people move, and what our goals are—when we're thinking about how the government operates in this very important space. 

Projects tend to be very large and technically driven so making that discipline more about people and getting communities where they need to go has sometimes been a hard needle to thread. Compound that with the fact that places are competing for dollars and climate change pressure continues to creep in. 

What’s exciting about being in this arena right now is how much opportunity there is to shift the policy debate towards being about the places people live and how they get to their, homes, jobs, education, health care, recreation, etc, in a way that is sensitive to the environment that we live in, accounting for the deep impacts that infrastructure can have on communities, the environment, equity, and opportunity. That's what I find exciting about working in this area. And I think that that's where a lot of the issues that come to the fore lie.

If you were to look back 10 years, would you have thought you'd be the executive director of a state DOT? Was it something you’d been working toward, happenstance, or were you in the right place at the right time?

I think every little girl's dream is to run a snow fleet, don't you? 

I have aspired to and worked in public service for almost the entirety of my career. I made the shift from federal to state with a strong interface to local in 2017. What has appealed to me about transportation for a long time is how much of an opportunity there is to have this very real impact on the way people live their lives in an extremely tangible fashion that has, frankly, a significant share of the resources that we put into the built environment. But it's often not been a place where you talk about community impact. Ten years ago, people didn't think of a state DOT director as a job where you tackle those challenges. We have a rising generation of folks with different backgrounds and orientations. There’s a shift that is changing what these jobs are as much as it's changing whether you want to work with state DOTs. 

The opportunities in these roles are being seen now in a different way. And that's a very exciting opportunity to have but it’s also a tide that you can see shifting, as you look at who else is starting to do this job. The job has always managed multibillion-dollar portfolios; it hasn’t always been a policymaking space. There's now an increased recognition of how much significant thought leadership you can achieve as a DOT director. I joke a little bit about the snowplow fleet, but the operational component of what you do in this job is one of the single most rewarding, impactful things, you can have the chance to achieve. When you think about the workforce challenges—we'll talk about it in the abstract a little bit—there’s a remarkable nexus between big-picture policymaking and the day-to-day work that keeps our system functioning in a way that's very real. 

The challenges that we're tackling, like modernizing our maintenance and operations workforce, are underappreciated as being at the cutting edge of some of the macro-economic issues we all talk about; thinking about how you get a new generation to do these kinds of jobs, not the way they were done 50 years ago, but the way they're done in 2023 is as real in the tactical side of what we do as in the policy space, so being able to do both of those at once is something that's very special about places like DOT.

You mentioned the tide turning in this state DOT space, and the percentage of women in state DOT leadership has also been growing. A little over a quarter of the state DOTs have a woman leader—my question is how do we make sure that the growth toward equity continues in a positive direction?

It’s something we must tackle. It's more than having the figurehead in an organization who happens to be a woman. One of the achievements I'm very proud of is the gender breakdown of the senior executive team and our organization reflects roughly the breakdown of the population of the state. More women leading state DOTs is a big deal. It’s also part of the responsibility that you have, to create a ladder, so to speak, so that it becomes a more inclusive culture as a whole and there’s room for qualified women to grow. It's as much about making the work environment a place where people feel comfortable coming from a lot of different backgrounds. It’s about diversifying the skill, making teams feel comfortable, 

I like being mindful of diversity and inclusion in a way that has not always been the norm. To give you a couple of examples of what that means, there is more participation from the maintenance and operation side of our team than there was before. When you think about a space that was not friendly to women, you can imagine people from different backgrounds potentially feeling uncomfortable. 

Driving a truck is not a lot of little girls’ dreams, or at least it wasn’t historically. And you don't solve that issue by having one or two people who look like you as the only ones you see out there driving trucks; you solve it by having it be an environment where people see other people often and everywhere. We've recruited some unbelievable up-and-coming female snowplow operators in the last few years, and we've consciously put them out there as the stars that they are. When their counterparts come in they can see themselves in the career discipline. That doesn't just happen unless you use the leadership position to make that happen. I'm not an engineer and engineering is a traditionally male dominated-profession, and it was traditionally not a very diverse profession, either. That's changing.

You start with embracing and celebrating the fact that different backgrounds come together in this space. You get a different racial breakdown, a different gender breakdown, and a more inclusive culture. 

Yes, it is a big deal. More women are leading state DOTs, but the metric is not just about having the people at the top look different. It's about what they do to lift people up, whether it's recruiting them or helping them matriculate through the organization so that the bench that you build is more representative than the one that you inherited.

What have we gotten wrong in how we approach the industry? 

It's a great question. And there are a lot of different ways you could take this answer.

I'll start with a thought: this is not a discipline where transparency about the challenges we face is the culture. If you’ve read “The Power Broker” or any of the classic books about infrastructure, you’ll know that it's a space where starting from the “technical” has been a way to limit who gets to participate in the conversation. (There are times when you need that to happen—you don't want the general public weighing in on what makes a bridge safe, right?) You do want the general public to weigh in on where you want to build the bridge. Because there's so much technical material in this space, it has sometimes overcorrected in the direction of mistaking the forest for the trees about what people need. 

And that means that you're not talking as much about the problems you're solving for as much as you're talking about the technical solutions to how you build the bridge. 

This comes to play very strongly in the equity side of the conversation, where the big innovation in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, was to create a process where people from communities that were potentially going to get radically reformed, for better or worse, by infrastructure, got to have a say. That was important progress, but the fact that that had to happen is reflective of the fact that this is a perennial tension in this space. 

The Biden Administration has been very instrumental in leaning into this, having a conversation about the why of what we build, and where and what it goes to, with the people on both sides of this metaphorical bridge. There is an ongoing need to have that conversation in a different way than we have in the past. When I worked for Secretary Foxx at USDOT, he would talk about the connecting and dividing aspects of infrastructure and he was a lone voice at the time, it seemed like a peripheral competition where it wasn't getting a lot of traction. It's inspiring to see, not that much later, that it's become a lot more mainstream to have that be a part of the infrastructure conversation, but I think it gets to a much bigger issue about having more inclusive voices talking about the purpose of building transportation, 

I would highlight climate change as another space where this really comes to a head in a very meaningful way, both in the sense that being honest about the pressures of climate change make infrastructure assets fragile in a way where you might have to have hard conversations, and about how the planning aspect is very relevant in mitigating carbon pollution in the atmosphere. Both of those were not things that were talked about nearly as openly as they are now. 

In Colorado, we have this 13-mile interstate through a canyon, where we cannot make the risks of that asset go away. We've mitigated them every way we know how, and every expert in the space has weighed in and done truly phenomenal things to protect against the risk. But the reality is that when you have a road that was built through an incredibly fragile ecosystem that is getting hit by extreme weather events of all kinds—the risk only increases. 

In California, you see what is happening with their snowpack and you can only imagine what that's going to mean for the infrastructure. I don't live there, but it's keeping me up at night to think about what happens when that all melts. In New York, you have the images of the New York City Subway flooding. 

All of these reflect the pressures of extreme weather hitting infrastructure in ways where you can do what you can to protect and mitigate, but you can't make the ecosystem situation go away just by hardening the road. That segues into the reality that the number one source of pollution is transportation right now. If we don't think differently about how we move, it's an awfully large slice of the problem that isn't being tackled fully. Making cars and trucks more efficient is phenomenally important, but it’s also a matter of how you think about the trips people are taking and giving people the choices to make more sustainable decisions as they move. 

All of that has to be packaged together in a comprehensive but matter-of-fact conversation about what we're up against.

What are some specific challenges that Colorado faces?

Colorado's system of roads goes through a more daring set of environmental locations and some other states—when I read when I was the Chief Operating Officer of Rhode Island DOT, we did not run a large avalanche mitigation program. 

People ask what the most surprising aspect of this job is. My answer is always that I didn't know we ran a medium-sized artillery when I came here. The roads in Colorado go through every extremity you can imagine. We have places that get very, very hot and places that get very, very cold, with all sorts of precipitation in the winter; we have mountains, we have rivers, we have valleys. The roads go through a very harsh set of terrain, which means that no matter how fast we patch the potholes, some of them are going to come back the next year. Our system runs upwards of ten-thousand-foot elevations regularly. That doesn't happen in every part of the country…I don’t think Illinois has that issue. The East Coast has its host of other challenges, but they're different. 

The breadth of environments the Colorado infrastructure network traverses is singular to Colorado. Growth pressures that the state is under make it a very dynamic setup right now. Along the East Coast, density is quite significant and not going to change that much. New England is dense, right? They call it “Little Rhodie,” not just as an affectionate nickname, it actually is—you could walk to Massachusetts from my house. That also means that New England is not going to be existentially different 10 years from now than it is now. They’re constantly managing places that were built up, some of them during the Revolutionary War. There's not that much more space to grow.

In Colorado, the population is fluctuating rapidly and COVID changed that in ways that surprised even people who knew that there was change coming fast here. Medium-sized cities are turning into big cities and small towns that were beautiful, but relatively undiscovered, are now bursting at the seams. Those parallel sets of pressures are very interesting because they converge. The reality of telework has changed what you can do from home. 

Most people outside of very certain parts of the state did not know where Salida, Colorado was until three years ago and now housing costs have accelerated to a degree that rivals coasts now. There are networks of towns that are in rural areas that have just been inundated with people discovering that they're beautiful. That changes what they are, and changes how you get there. What’s it going to mean for the Salidas and the Breckenridges of the world when they can't account for these new population pressures? There’s a big push statewide to think strategically about what it means to help places grow responsibly, how you get there, and what access looks like, so we don't just end up with two cars per person as places grow. It won’t be sustainable.

Breckenridge (Left) and Salida (Right)

How do you balance the investment between Denver and the rest of the state? Some states, like Virginia DOT, have built a very formulaic and transparent way of how they handle investment for dense centers of population near Washington, DC compared to the rest of the state. Is there something like that in Colorado that helps to communicate how the state handles growth and development and access for Denver versus western Colorado or Boulder or somewhere in the northeast?

It's an interesting question and it's one where the answer is changing fast. The narrative in politics is that there's “urban” and there's “rural,” and there are these two polar extremes that get caricatured at both ends. In Colorado, like in other parts of the country, too, there are gradations of these different characteristics that look different in different places. Mountain towns in Colorado don't really fit into either of those categories, and the pressures that they face have elements of both. Unless we think a little bit more tactically about what the different types of places are starting to look like, we miss the opportunity to help them be the best versions of what they are. 

I used the example that some of these towns where people are moving [Ed. Salida and Breckenridge. See above, not three paragraphs ago.]; they're shifting economies. They were built up around resource extraction in a lot of cases, oil and gas, and minerals. There are a lot of towns in Colorado that are named after the minerals they used to mine. (Every Rock has a town in Colorado.) Their future in many cases is ecotourism. It changes what these towns look like and what they need for people to get there. 

The dynamic between short-term rentals [Ed. Like AirBnb or Vrbo—non-traditional “hotels”] and what that means for the population is very complicated. To help that transition happen in a way that works for the people who live there and for the revenue generators, you can't put them into the New York or the South Dakota box. They sometimes get lost in a conversation that's driven by two oversimplified categories (urban or rural). 

There’s a version of the national policy that impacts Colorado. Colorado gets just hosed on the highway formula—the formula that allocates dollars per state. You do very well if you're Rhode Island, and you do very well if you're South Dakota, but Colorado is a net loser in this system of formula dollars. South Carolina and Texas are the other ones. What that story tells us is that because we're so focused on the very urban in the very rural, we lose these mid-density places that don't really look like either. A lot of Colorado fits into the space where the policy parameters that we do have we don't quite know what to do with. Helping to define that conversation in transportation in a way that doesn't try and force round pegs in square holes is a place where both the Federal and state programs could really mature in the way that they start with a place-based structure and start by looking at the place you're looking at, and not trying to force it into someone else's box.

So that leads us to our next series of questions. I agree with your comment about the way we create and the way we dish dollars is outdated, but also based on the understanding that growth has been one way for so long, and it will continue that way and population centers grew one way for so long and will continue that way. Your metaphor of “square peg in a round hole,” or even “round peg in a square hole,” depends on which begets what is an apt one. So given these parameters, given that the formula isn’t likely to change what can we do better with the resource that we have now?

Formulas are hard to change. But we talk about it because if we don't start talking about it, it'll never change. But that's a heavy lift. 

Changing who gets to have a say in how we define what a project is, and how it’s an important conversation where there's also a lot of space for creativity. One of our quirky COVID programs that succeeded beyond our wildest expectations, was a program called Revitalizing Main Street. It started as a small grant program to help small towns and larger cities do outdoor dining so they could keep their businesses afloat—we would never have gone down this road in normal times, but when it became clear that the way to keep restaurants open was to set up nice patios that needed roads. 

We set up this program that started with these tiny grants about helping communities move their stuff outside so they could manage in the COVID era. What it turned into was a staggeringly broad conversation about how to use public space in communities in ways that reflected the stuff that got people excited. It supported everything from public art, using some of the road space to do more active transportation, to lighting. When I got into the space, decorating the streets, so they looked nice was something people joked about, but it actually matters for public safety, right? You can laugh about stringing Christmas lights on a street where people walk but having a space that looks inviting at night where business can happen, and people can be outside… helps both safety and the economy in ways that are real and also not new. 

It's Jane Jacobs's theory of “eyes on the street” has been around for a long time. Something about the culture of big infrastructure projects taught us to treat these things like they were silly. It turns out that when you have a bottom-up space for communities to tell you what they actually want in their downtown, there's a lot of attention paid to what it looks like and how it feels. And it turns into a conversation about people moving in an organic way…and a little bit less about cars. 

Had the State told cities and towns to do that it would have been perceived as outrageous, but the brunt of places that told us they wanted that was unbelievable. We have over 200 grant recipients, ranging from Denver to these small towns in every corner of the state came up with some idea like this, it wasn't just the blue ones, the red ones, the big ones, or the small ones; it was pervasive.

Letting people in communities tell you what they need and what they want their community to look like is one way to change what defines a project, and what we think our line of business is. Thinking strategically about how to build coalitions to go in for federal dollars in ways that reflect excitement about the future is something we've put a lot of effort into as well. We've embraced the idea that the big fish in the pond can pull grant applications together that combine a lot of thematically linked projects in different places that could help with, say, a transit corridor. For example, we won a $24-plus-million dollar grant last year for a series of transit investments in three different communities along the western slope of Colorado and is helping I-70 become a transit corridor. That's a new way of thinking about project definition; that's a lot more bottom-up. It can help to create different kinds of visioning around projects.

Two follow-up questions about that have to do with buy-in and language. First, how do you share with local communities that have never engaged with the state DOT, or even their MPO, on a meaningful level to train them to speak in the language of what's possible? 

Transportation is very much shaped on the back of Federalism, right? The way money passes through and the way projects are built is very much vertically stacked, from USDOT to MPOs and state DOTs will respond to any money that's made available, but what about the bottom-up approach? Local communities may have issues and don't know how to communicate them to their MPOs or to the state in a meaningful way that warrants a response or money. What can the state do to help flatten the process, if at all?

Colorado has taken some interesting steps to help MPOs have the tools that they need to be effective conveners and regional voices and not just the place where everybody takes their parochial projects and gets them on a list. In the abstract theory, an MPO is supposed to be an entity created to think regionally and not just have everything be in silos. In practicality, there are few MPOs that have pulled that off. It’s hard because your board ends up being filled with everybody and their parochial interests. Something that we did that came from the state that phenomenally empowered the MPOs was the GHG Pollution Reduction Planning Standard from about a year ago to set emissions targets, both for the State and for each respective metropolitan region. It gave the MPOs a reason why they had to measure the project against those targets, which gave them real leverage over being able to work towards a regional goal. We all thought the rule was a good idea after it was required by the legislature, but what surprised me the most was how quickly it emboldened the Denver MPO to have a different voice in bringing people together around big priorities. The Denver MPO called DRCOG [Ed. Pronounced “doctor cog”] had been wanting to do more on things like community transit, environmental sustainability, and other issues for a long time, but they had a large board of elected officials who all come with their own very strong opinions. 

And it was hard for DRCOG’s staff to have the gravitas in the conversation to be able to say to a big region with a lot of elected players, “Look, we need to coalesce around certain goals,” and this rule gave them a way to do it. Quickly, they were able to step up their planning process in a way that said, “We are going to make bus rapid transit [BRT] a big priority for this region. Let's work together to figure out which ones have the biggest positive impact.” It shifted what projects were included in their plan, but I think it also shifted their demean or in driving a policy conversation with confidence. 

When I think about the biggest accomplishments we've made in the space, I think about their changed role. It was something they probably couldn't have done without legislative direction at the state level. Even during the legislative process, the MPOs were timid about what they could say, and they supported it in the end, but not they were not the drivers of it. And if you look at who is empowered as actors, it's more of them than us. That's a neat lesson learned in terms of what states can do to help their MPOs think bigger than the parochialism that can happen when you have a lot of people whose interests are more localized trying to negotiate with each other at a board table.

Where did this rule come from? Was it legislatively driven or gubernatorially driven? Did CDOT ask for this?

About a year before the federal package passed, there was a state law called Senate Bill 260, which was a broad-reaching state transportation package. It included a fraught negotiation between the proponents of both traditional infrastructure investment and those wanting it to be more of a planning bill. What resulted from it was a classic compromise where there were different titles in the bill that were a priority for the folks both in the legislature and in the environmental community. Local communities wanted this law to be proactive on climate change with a title that had policy provisions requiring things like greenhouse gas measurement for regionally significant projects. 

There was a very robust focus on the environmental community and making sure that this got implemented in a way that was serious. The dialogue that happened between CDOT, local governments, and activists was interesting in this respect. What resulted from it was a step that got done a lot more than what the Federal steps in these conversations are but with more buy-in. It's absolutely controversial. There are people who don't like it, but the rule as it's being implemented, does not stop business from occurring, which was one of the fears, and it doesn't stop road widenings from happening. It has a real requirement of binding targets that force everybody to do business a little differently in thinking about the climate impacts of big infrastructure projects. 

Some specific examples of what it means in practice: highway widening projects we're doing almost unilaterally have a real transit component. Bus rapid transit is the preferred alternative in one of our biggest highways-widening projects, and it has an environmental justice component, too, adding bus service into the mountains as part of a project we're doing to fix a long-standing bottleneck on I-70, which is the road to the mountains, 

All of those are modifications of how you do a road project that reflects the need to think about multimodal solutions but doesn't stop the project from happening. Using the MPO as an example, they did switch some projects and put more of a focus on bus rapid transit over highway interchanges—it doesn't mean that there are no highway interchanges happening, but it means that there's more of a balance in terms of what projects they're coming up with. And I think that the direction absolutely came from the legislature. I don't think it could have been done without the bill.

Would you say that the law is driven more by carrots or sticks—which way would you say it leans based on Colorado politics?

Carrots and sticks tend not to work in isolation, in either case. 

There’s another title in the law that ties the implementation of the policy to the distribution of the multimodal options fund at the state and local levels. It required the policy lever, but it also tied it to funding. That’s the carrot and stick baked in, in that it was required if you wanted money. That’s very much how we see these things playing out. You think about grant programs and opportunities for funding along with the requirements for that funding, and you don't create a piece of regulation that isn't tied to helping people have the resources to do it right. 

Sometimes that's money; sometimes it's technical assistance; sometimes it's regulatory flexibility; sometimes it's having the state help a local government do a project that is bigger than they can do themselves.

Would you say that your state legislature in Colorado has a clear grasp on the nuanced transportation issues in the state—does CDOT have a good relationship with that state legislature? But there are states where the state DOT says, we need a law passed to be able to do the things we want to do but the legislature doesn't know that there's no law in place to do those things and then it's a big back and forth with the different entities talking past each other. That’s not the case in Colorado.

It is in some ways, but there's more ability for people to think creatively than there is in other parts of the country. 

This state legislature has more forward-thinking leaders than some other ones do. There's more diversity in the Colorado state legislature than I have seen in other ones (Granted, Rhode Island is its own universe.) There’s more interesting policy coming out of this legislature than in many other states, there's a lot of up-and-comers in different corners. 

We have a part-time legislature here, as many states do. What that means is that you get a lot of interesting people who are emerging in their careers and seeking out legislative seats and there are term limits, so they don't do it forever. That has pros and cons. There are a lot of rising stars in the state legislature in Colorado; several of them just got elected to Congress. One of the state senators who was on our committee of jurisdiction is now a member of the US House of Representatives. 

There are a lot of success stories coming out of the Colorado State Legislature and it's an interesting group of people. The executive agencies are high functioning and that's a function of there being an active Governor who really wants the agencies to take on policy and do things. That’s something you'd have in some places, but not everywhere, and having the confluence of an active Governor and a part-time, emergent legislature makes for a place where things get done in a way that shows results. There are a lot of things that we've done here and a lot of different policy spaces that have gotten copied by other states that have then gotten copied by the Federal government. That shows that the Colorado model is an incubator for Federal law.

What does a successful future look like? I’ve spoken to some engineers who give me next week as their frame and then some planners who talk about 50 years from now, so anywhere in between there is probably reasonable. Looking back from that timeframe, what will make you say, “Yeah, we did we did this right.”

You've just identified the existential difficulty engineers and planners have, even having lunch together while working on projects! Like most things, the truth is somewhere in between. Having investment decisions and place-based decisions that happen together is a recipe for success. 

Places that are growing and places that are changing should be able to say, “This is what we want to look like,” and follow with investments—whether they're big, small, heavy infrastructure, or putting up some bollards for a bike lane—aligned with what they want the place to look like, is a success. That means different things in different places. 

It's hard to argue with having place-based decisions that start with a conversation of what you want your home—and I use that broadly—to look like. Transportation has not always been that either in the engineering or the planning space. That divergence between engineers who decide they want the bridge before they talk about why and the planners whose vision fifty years from now is more aspirational relative to the reality we live in, stops us from doing the obvious. 

Coloradans can now have a conversation about what they want their Main Street to look like and just do it; it doesn't last for seventy years, and it’s tweaked in five years. This is a successful transportation conversation, one where you start with where people are trying to go and why they're trying to go there, and how you figure it out in a way that makes for a nice quality of life that's as sustainable as it can be from an environmental perspective. It may seem visionary, but in a lot of ways, it's the gold standard in a space that gets caught between building big projects for the sake of building big projects and aspiring in a way that is sometimes impractical. 

There’s also a place between next week and fifty years from now. If you think about the planning horizon in five-to-ten-year increments, you tend to make better decisions than if you think about either next week or the next century. 

One of the things we've done here is target ten years as our sweet spot in what we're thinking about: we set up a 10-year plan when the governor started his administration, and we're about halfway done. That's a nice horizon where we can not only make some future commitments but also be able to track against them. A lot of people think fifty-year plans are goofy, and some of those people are planners.

I'm one of those planners.

It’s a way to also not say no, right? If you have a fifty-year list, everybody's project, good, better, indifferent, can be somewhere on the fifty-year list, and you don't have to say no, you just have to say, “You're in year forty-nine.” People don't like saying no because it's hard. And if you're thinking in five-to-ten-year increments, instead of fifty-year increments, you have to decide what to burn.

I'm one of those people that likes to say no. My ideal job would be like “project cop” inside some inspector general’s office where I could, within reason be like, “Nope. Thanks, though.” I’d be the most hated man in New York.

You get to say no a lot running a state DOT if you’re any good at it.

One day. Last question: are you optimistic about the future?

Am I optimistic about the future? That there's a tolerance for things like talking about climate change and transportation, now—there wasn't five years ago. I have not been in this space for that long and I've seen things come from the very periphery to, at least left end of the norm, pretty quickly. A topic for another day is: who's around the table at the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO)? You shake your head like you've been to one of their conferences.

No comment! 

I will say on the record that their climate change conversations aren't very good, but they have them now. And I think that’s a start. The fact that at their big conferences, they feel like they have to address the topic, even if the panels aren’t very inspirational, is a change. That’s the status quo in transportation land and that would not have happened five years ago, let alone two years ago. It’s a lot of change in a space that managed to avoid change for a long time.

Any final thoughts?

I'll leave you with a visual image. There's a road, a straight distance between two points. They blew through a large rock so that there's a tiny indentation in these two like giant boulders to keep the road straight. If they would have shifted twenty feet away, they could have gone around, and I suspect it would have been a whole lot easier to build. If you don't drive a very specific portion of the Colorado State Highway you’d probably never see this. 

That image to me shows both what's been wrong with the way we plan infrastructure and how easily we could potentially correct it. And I could tell the same story about places where the way that they made a pedestrian corridor by putting up a couple of signs on a road without changing anything. There’s just a sign with a picture of a person walking. Some of the biggest innovations are obvious but haven’t been considered until fairly recently.