Tiffany-Ann Taylor on the Past, Present, and Future of Transportation

RPA's Vice President for Transportation dishes on real inclusivity, the idea that small steps are still steps, and whether or not she's optimistic about the future.

We’re back. We’re so back. I’ve been excited to share this interview for a while and the editing process has been enlightening. Relistening and relearning ideas continues to give me hope and it’s hard to imagine a conversation partner better than Tiffany-Ann Taylor. Her life and work experience run at a slight angle to mine, so while we agree on our approach to this field’s faults and opportunities to grow and change, how we got there is different. I learned a ton from talking to Tiffany-Ann, and I hope you do, too.

Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length. All comments and questions are welcome, below.

---

I’m Tiffany-Ann Taylor, Vice President for Transportation at the Regional Plan Association, also known as RPA.

Can you tell the audience a little bit about RPA’s mandate and specifically about what the Vice President of Transportation would do at an organization like RPA?

We are a 101-year-old, civic, nonprofit organization that centers research and advocacy efforts around all things related to quality of life improvements for the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut region. Our primary topics of interest are transportation, energy and the environment, and housing and community development. 

You can buy a copy of the Fourth Regional Plan from EI partner Island Press, here. Use code EXASPERATED for 25% off your order!

We provide original research on important questions and think about both what's happening now and what's happening in the future. Once about every 25 years, we put out a document called a Regional Plan, the last one of which was the Fourth Regional Plan that went out in 2017. It's a long-range plan that thinks about those three buckets for the region and asks questions like, “Are we prepared, or do our policies support the type of growth and change that we want to see? Our research then supports the advocacy that we do in those areas as well.

So my job at RPA depends on the day, quite honestly, and the slogan that I've come up with is, “If it moves in the region, I have to have an opinion on it.” And that's true. So some days, I could be talking about sidewalks and curb management and delivery vehicles and bicycles or reorganizing the street. And other days, I could be talking about megaprojects, like the Gateway Program, and the tunnel and the bridge work related to that, or re-imagining what capital construction infrastructure could look like, or having serious conversations about rehabilitating urban roadways such as the Brooklyn Queens expressway, the BQE, or even the Cross Bronx Expressway, and anything in between. So I've definitely had conversations about drones, I've had conversations about flying unmanned vehicles, autonomous vehicles, micro-mobility—scooters, e-bikes, anything of that nature. I work both independently and in collaboration with about 29 other people here. There are some issues that definitely sit in more than one of the multiple “buckets,” and a perfect example of that would be conversations around electric vehicles, right? That's both an energy and environment conversation and also a transportation conversation. 

Source

I think about these topics and how they are perhaps different or similar in all three areas. RPA also has a global network that we're connected to, so anywhere in the world, if someone wants to speak to us about the work that we've done, we're happy to do that as well. 

You're not an MPO—you're not NYMTC. And so there's a distinction there because the New York metro region is unique in that way; there's a lot of overlap across the three states. How does the relationship work between RPA and NYMTC? 

We do get that question a lot. We are not any type of municipal entity whatsoever. We don't have any legislative authority. We don't have any operational authority. We just have ideas, quite honestly and then we have the numbers to back up those ideas. We can't implement any policy and we don't run any piece of transportation infrastructure; we don't build houses; we really are an organization that does research and advocacy around those important topic areas that I talked about before. 

We do information exchanges, and sometimes  MPOs or local governments will reach out to us with questions, or perhaps want us to participate in advocacy around certain efforts, and vice versa. They often have access to a particular data set that might be of interest or can maybe speak to how they see the region or its boundaries. And that's important for people to know. 

There are other MPOs across the nation that we speak to as well. So I would consider them…not exactly sister organizations, but maybe cousin organizations.

Let’s talk about you—what’s been your career journey? How have you found yourself right here, right now?

I'll just start from my time in planning school. I went to Pratt Institute, and I discovered transportation planning when I was there, which is funny because Pratt really isn't a transportation planning school. They're more focused on community advocacy and development, which is obviously really important. My passion was really in transportation, understanding it as both an advocate and a practitioner, and wanting to have an impact in that space. 

Then I went to work for the Suffolk County government on Long Island in economic development and planning and I definitely learned there that transportation projects that centered on economic development were really an opportunity to see projects come to fruition perhaps faster than some of the other subject areas. Those types of projects can spur generational change, so being able to participate in those projects was really important to me. After working for the County, I had the opportunity to move to New York City and work for the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC)—there is a transportation group there, too—a small but mighty group that's half freight- and half passenger-focused. 

I worked in the passenger group on a variety of projects that were particularly out of the box. After that, I worked at the New York City Department of Transportation in their Freight Mobility group as a Deputy Director. My side of the house was focused on freight policy, education, research, safety, and compliance—all that good stuff. And then I came to RPA, as a Vice President for Transportation. I consider myself to be unique as a planner, in that I have both passenger and freight experience.

How would you describe your journey to a position of leadership, especially thought leadership, but also operational leadership and community/organizing leadership, all these tools that you've learned? What are some takeaways for people looking to learn from your experience?

I think it's important to say that in the space of both urban planning as a discipline, and even more narrowly in transportation, our space tends to be more white- and male-dominated. 

I am a Black woman and so I am already standing out amongst my peers. By definition, my career trajectory is unique, like I am a handful of a handful of a handful in my specialty. I have a Bachelor's and a Master's just like my white counterparts, but my experiences on different projects, both as a practitioner and as an advocate both externally as an advocate and internally as an advocate are unique, and I would say more or less also tied to my lived experience as a woman of color. 

My level of visibility is very notable, factually—not as a judgment. For most of my career, I have been in rooms where I might be the youngest, I might be the only person who identifies as female, I might be the only Black person. I stand out. 

In this space as a transportation leader it's taken a lot of self-esteem building, a lot of mentorship, both from more senior folks and my peers, and it's taken support from a village, emotionally, to be able to continue to chart the career trajectory that I've had. 

There have been opportunities where I feel like I haven't been treated fairly, so I've had to leave an organization to go and get the quality of employment that I think I deserve and that I'm worth, and be able to bring my expertise to it. My career trajectory is not necessarily unique, but it's definitely different compared to many of my counterparts and it will continue to be that way because if you look in the Tri-State Area in terms of leadership in transportation, whether it's public or private, there's very few if any, people who are leading major organizations or major operations that identify as Black females. For a good portion of my career, it will continue to look different compared to my counterparts. 

The other thing that I would add about my career path is volunteer time. I was really active in a professional organization, APA, the American Planning Association. The national organization has different chapters for the states, and some of the larger states have more than one chapter. So the local chapter is the New York Metro chapter. For that chapter, I was co-chair of the Diversity Committee for five years, and then I went on to become the chapter's first Black, female president for about a year and a half.

In my time there, primarily as a co-chair of the Diversity Committee, I co-created and co-hosted a national conference called the Hindsight Conference. That conference was centered on urban planning through the lens of equity in all subject areas, rather than just being a checkbox as a thing that you do. The creation of that conference allowed us to provide a stage where we could be intentional about the work that's being done, who's doing the work, and the intersectionality of all of the subject areas within planning.  I mention it because this was also a key component to contributing to my career trajectory because it gave me a certain level of visibility in this space that I wasn't necessarily getting in my nine-to-five job. It also allowed me the opportunity to practice leadership, how to rebound from mistakes, how to have executive authority, how to lead groups, and how to fundraise. 

Those two things combined have made my professional journey different than perhaps others in the field. Now I sit in an organization where I have both the technical expertise to undertake research and the non-technical expertise to lead and represent in the space of advocacy.

Being able to do both in the transportation space at an organization that has such high visibility and respect, is a unique opportunity.

Where are we now, where did we veer off this path toward the promised land of equitable transportation—the right to move? 

I've been thinking about this very, very big question. I'm gonna throw out two things that perhaps aren't physical things, but are more administrative and less tangible. One is exactly this conversation that we're having about representation and leadership. When you have more diverse voices, more diverse lived experiences, and more diverse thoughts, then you come up with more diverse solutions, and you think more about other types of problems. I think our industry has suffered for years because there is a lot of homogeneity in our industry leadership. 

There is a tendency from an American perspective, maybe it's different in other countries [Ed. It’s not.], to romanticize big, shiny infrastructure projects. What do I mean by that? The projects that cost billions, or high-millions of dollars. Those projects are really important, don't get me wrong; we do need continued investments in the multibillion-dollar projects, but the multibillion-dollar projects don't solve everything. They can overshadow the need for more equitable transportation in the gaps between the big projects, in our transportation “deserts,” for example. A small improvement can be a really big deal for someone, like reconfiguring a street such that now there's outdoor dining; perhaps kids can play with sidewalk chalk because the road has been reallocated to community programming during certain hours in a week; now there is a park and there's green space in a neighborhood that never really had it before. 

Smaller scale interventions are still really meaningful, and sometimes they get overlooked and are overshadowed by so much attention on the big things. That is a trap that's easy to fall into. 

Another perfect example is—yes, I love subways, I love trains, and I love the investments in those modes, but let's not forget about buses. Buses often get overshadowed. That's a prime example of a conversation that you have to have repeatedly so that folks remember that in the back of their mind—especially at a time when federal funding for infrastructure projects is so intense—it's very easy to get swept up in the excitement around spending $6 billion or $7 billion on something. 

In sum: a lack of diversity in transportation leadership and a tendency to focus on the big shiny projects are things we’ve gotten wrong.

My first thought is to combine these ideas. The lack of diverse representation in leadership is also the lack of diverse representation in identifying problems from the communities to do those small projects. The things that affect everyone's day-to-day commute are what people know about because they live on a street in a part of Brooklyn, or the Bronx, or Manhattan that they see every day that we, the “experts” would miss.

We might be experts in solutions and we might know how to fix every problem, but how do we know what the problems are if we don't have diversity in leadership, and we don't have diversity in outreach? That level of trust has been broken for so many decades—generations at this point. So I wonder if you could comment on your two points together, doing the small projects in communities that are themselves underrepresented?

That's an excellent point. I think that is the perfect way to make that correlation. And I think that the answers, unfortunately, are not simple. It's not as simple as, “You need to recruit more people of color at the entry level.” No, that's not the case. Yes, you need to promote them and recruit them, but also how are you making your workplace a safe environment and how are you creating opportunities for folks to mature through it to leadership? 

It’s one thing to be hired as an intern as a person of color, but what's your experience as a mid-level manager? What's your experience like as a senior manager, or as a leader of the organization? How are you even attracting folks to the industry? How are you attracting them to planning school? What is the cost of the education? Are you paying your interns? Something so simple—some people cannot participate in internships because they are unpaid. 

You've already made the playing field disproportionate. 

For every immediate hit that there is about a large project, that's one fewer pair of eyes on the small stuff. It can take the attention away from the fact that the small stuff needs regular investments. They're absolutely related. I think that's a great observation, but it takes more than intentionality. It takes creating a support system and safe spaces for people to mature as professionals. It also takes repeated advocacy around the need for continued investment in smaller-scale interventions.

My observation—tell me if I'm way off here—is that this is a generational problem that we don't have time to wait for. So there's a big-time mismatch. My understanding is that a lot of folks of color, and a lot of folks who come from disadvantaged backgrounds or minority communities, a lot of times, it's the first time someone in their family will have gone to college or grad school, and a lot of folks, rightfully, tend to gravitate toward more lucrative majors and careers. We’re starting to see a real, growing population of Black doctors, Latine engineers, and LGBTQ+ lawyers who often don’t lean into “softer” or lower-paying fields like urban planning, which has been non-coincidentally reclassified as a STEM degree at a lot of schools to attract students and funding. How far off is that assessment?

You're actually not that far off. There are definitely generational differences across the field, and I think what you're essentially talking about is the impact of systemic racism that persists. 

We're also at a turning point in the planning profession, where it's an old enough profession that we have enough history to look back on and see the mistakes that we've made. But we're young enough to realize that there are other ways to do things, or other ways to try and undo the harm. You're now looking at a class of folks who have access to more information than ever with the invention of the internet. You're looking at folks who are becoming more civically engaged in local politics. You're right, and it's documented, that people of color tend to have an introduction to the field of urban planning much later in life compared to their white counterparts. I fall into that as well, I did not know urban planning was a profession until the last semester of my undergraduate program. 

The funny part about that is I am from a town, two towns over from where there is a life-sized, bronze statue of Robert Moses. It's ironic. That's how I grew up. He wasn't a planner but without a doubt, he left a major imprint on the field. 

It’s Bob, himself. (Google Maps).

There are also financial considerations for folks; many folks could be the first person in their family to go off to higher education and could be the breadwinner in their family for a generation. The planning field, in my opinion, does not have good entry-level wages [Ed. On the East Coast at least]. The cost of a planning degree and a graduate degree, if you decide to pursue it, is significant. And so that's not in alignment. You're asking people to take out loans, perhaps, to pay for an education, but then not providing them with an appropriate salary for an entry-level position. You're forcing people to make different decisions. 

The other part of that is people of color tend to, when they are introduced to urban planning as a field, and more so than their white counterparts, have had negative interactions before they even get to college or graduate school. For example, if someone has deemed your neighborhood full of blight; if a highway has been built through it, and your grandparents are still alive to remember it; if there's been no investment in beautification, or if you're in a neighborhood where there are more brownfields than there are greenfields; if you are experiencing the negative results of chronic disinvestment; if your grandmother is old enough to remember; your mom's old enough to remember, even if you don't have the planning vocabulary, you already have this negative association with the field and perhaps even with working for government or working for a firm that does engineering and construction. 

That essentially trickles down to, “Who are the folks who are interested in pursuing the degree, who are the folks that are graduating with a degree, and who are the folks that are ultimately entering the field, and lastly, who are the folks that entered who continue to stay.” You're talking about a series of trickle-down questions that absolutely impact who the pool of applicants is once you start talking about opportunities for leadership.

We have problems. We have an immigrant crisis, we have a climate crisis, and systemic racism is still a crisis we'd have to solve, but we don't have two generations to undo everything. 

What can we do right now to affect this change?

What can we do right now? It’s important for folks to know that small steps are still steps. Because this conversation that we've had is great, but it's also overwhelming. We just talked about institutional racism. In 10 minutes we've identified a problem, and we're trying to solve it. 

The small things matter. At the time, I had the opportunity and I had the emotional bandwidth to put on a conference that gave visibility to practitioners in this field, who deserve to be seen and whose work deserves to be promoted, to encourage more of these conversations. You should also think about what line of authority you have in your role, whether you're in the private sector or public sector, do you have the ability to hire interns? Do you have the ability to adjust salary demands? Do you have the ability to give people specific training and to invest in their professional development? Have you created a safe space for folks? Have you provided a level of transparency around what professional growth and opportunities for leadership actually mean? Or is it a place where if you work there long enough, you just advance? 

What type of cultural intelligence is applied to your work? 

Do you even talk about the history of a neighborhood when you're about to do a project? Who are the stakeholders on your projects? Is everybody involved and equally represented? Are you only talking to the people who have the luxury of joining a community board meeting at two o'clock in the afternoon on a Wednesday? Are you calling out loaded vocabulary in your spaces? When someone says, “Oh, that area doesn't feel safe to me.” Or, “Oh, that tenant is not going to be a good anchor tenant because they're not a good fit?” Why? What is the fit? How do you define fit? What does safety mean? Who does it feel safe to? And why or why not? 

What are the criteria in our RFPs? How are you making sure that MWBE (Minority and/or Women-owned Business Enterprises) organizations and other small businesses are getting paid on time? 

How are you tracking the success of those programs?

It's one thing to say, “Our project’s contractors are 60% MWBE,” but if those contractors never get their first paycheck until a month later—are you doing more harm than good? 

What are the things that you're pulling apart? 

On an interpersonal level, make sure you're questioning the question. That's my favorite thing to say sometimes as a planner. You're prompted to answer a question that's been put forth by an elected official or the supervisor of your organization. Ask yourself, “Is this the question that we should even be asking right now? Is the answer going to get us one step in the direction that we need to go? Or are we just continuing to perpetuate harm?”

That's why I mentioned small steps are still steps.

I can speak to an example where I worked for an organization, and I had a sub-consultant write a job description for me to hire for an open position on my team. I was only getting male applicants. I said, “This is very strange. Let me see the job description.” The job requirements were very specific, like degrees in transportation engineering only and civil engineering only. Not that people who are of specific genders can only have those degrees, but we know that those are very male-dominated professions. So I said to the consultant, “I need you to open this up because I actually don't need a traffic engineer for this role. We could find someone in public administration, public policy, urban planning, geography, or social work. Expand the universe of people who are even eligible to apply.”

That is a small step, but that's an important step. That's just a short list of things you can do. So don’t feel overwhelmed; no one's asking you to boil the ocean, but it is important for you to take small steps, especially in your ability to influence decision-making as you progress up the career ladder.

What I'm hearing you say is intentionality from leadership and not just following a path because “this is how we've always done it.” That's how we got ourselves into this problem. 

One of the theses of my blog is that we don't know how to spend a trillion dollars. We don't. We can have all the graphs and breakdowns and allocations and appropriations that we want. But what constitutes success for a project? Is it a return on investment? Is it a benefit-cost analysis, which is an 80-year-old metric that we use now that measures the value of time— for whom? The folks who are in charge of making these decisions need to empower their employees, to empower people who work with them, their partners and stakeholders, to go out and do that hard work, to build back trust or build trust for the first time in a place that's only ever been planned at.

That's my understanding. And that's how I try to approach my practice. Whenever someone asks me in an interview how do you approach a project? What do you care about? My two things are safety and dignity. Dignity isn’t a topic that’s brought up very often because it’s hard to measure, but we see safety in practice in a lot of places where if a project does not increase the overall safety of the network, we're not doing it. 

Dignity is a great way to bring in avatars and representatives of a community: think about your grandmother or an elderly person in your life. Does she have to take two late buses and walk on a sidewalk that isn't finished to get to her destination? Does the bus stop have shade or protection from rain or snow? Are the schedules even built in such a way that it works for her needs?

It's a great lens to look through problem windows without being overly dogmatic. It's a great way to go about project specifications to include in an RFP. You don't want every project to lose money—that’s the sign of a project or series of projects that can’t attract investment or use—but when we work in the public sector we're providing a public service. There are only so many times you can go back to your community and say “more please” after every project just makes their lives worse, or doesn't affect their life in a positive way. If all you're doing is tearing up a street—whose street?—because folks who live along it can't do anything about it, to fix a “problem,” are you really fixing anything? We need to set an example by questioning the question.

Lastly, it’s also important to note that we don't have a lot of political power as planners, either. But we need to be amplifying our and others’ voices as often as possible. 

That said, what does a successful future look like?

A successful future looks like a room where I'm not counting, on one hand, the number of people that I identify with; where people aren't surprised that the person talking about transportation identifies as a woman or as a Black person; where projects about cracks in the sidewalk get the same level of effort and priority as a $7 billion bridge reconstruction project; where more intersectionality is taught in planning curriculum. It's great if your school focuses on real estate, but a transportation planning intro course should also be mandatory. If your school focuses on transportation engineering, a mandatory class on housing should be included. 

That's really what success looks like: these things become matter-of-fact and second nature.

Are you optimistic?

No, I’m not optimistic. I definitely see strides in certain parts of the industry. I'm also obviously talking from a Northeast Regional bias, in terms of my immediate proximity, but I am hopeful. The more that I am visible; the more other people have the opportunity to be visible, especially when they're in leadership positions; and the more people in my own network, including myself, are teaching courses, introducing different types of textbooks, different types of cultural readings for everyone in their class, we’re getting to the core of what people learn before they even start their degree; the more that we start to penetrate that and break that open and dissect it, and reassess priority in those conversations, I'm seeing progress there. And I'm hopeful in that regard.