Abstract
Dr. Joshua Schank will discuss his latest book, written with Emma Huang and Marla Westervelt Berg, which offers pragmatic lessons for driving change inside public agencies from the people who've done it.
Transit agencies across the country are navigating shrinking budgets, pressure to attract new riders, and growing demands to bring on new technologies. New Tricks for Old Bureaucracies, written by three veterans of Los Angeles Metro's Office of Extraordinary Innovation (OEI), is a guide for those in public transit, and people who care about the mission of any government organization. It offers a practical, honest account of what it actually takes to drive change from inside a large public agency.
While working at OEI, an office within LA Metro, Dr. Schank launched on-demand transit, enabled automated bus-lane enforcement, advanced congestion pricing, and built a strategic plan that still guides Metro today, all while learned hard lessons about what makes change stick and what makes it stall.
Dr. Schank is now a partner at InfraStrategies LLC, Professor at UCLA, and the Executive Director of the ACES Mobility Coalition, a public sector led advocacy organization dedicated to advancing shared autonomous mobility. He works with transit agencies across the country to advance new ideas.
Bio
Joshua Schank is the Managing Partner at InfraStrategies, a transportation and financial advisory firm, where he leads a practice focused on innovation, strategic planning, and technology. He also serves as the Executive Director of the Autonomous, Connected, Electric, and Shared (ACES) Mobility Coalition, and is a Senior Fellow in the Institute for Transportation Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and a Research Associate at the Mineta Transportation Institute. His latest book is “New Tricks for Old Bureaucracies: Improving Public Policy Outcomes in the Public Sector”.
Prior to joining InfraStrategies and UCLA, Dr. Schank was the first-ever Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro). Dr. Schank joined Metro in 2015 to establish the agency’s Office of Extraordinary Innovation (OEI), which fostered innovations to improve mobility, equity and environmental outcomes across LA County. Dr. Schank led an office that shaped Metro’s high-level strategic vision, serving as a liaison to the academic community, designing, piloting and implementing innovative programs and policies, and engaging entrepreneurs and businesses to develop public-private-partnerships. Dr. Schank helped create and lead numerous transformative Metro projects including the Vision 2028 Strategic Plan, Metro Micro, Mobility on Demand, Metro’s Traffic Reduction Study, Better Bus, two Pre-Development Agreements for the Sepulveda Transit Corridor, a Public-Private-Partnership for the West Santa Ana Branch, and an aerial tram from Union Station to Dodger Stadium.
Dr. Schank previously served as President and CEO of the Eno Center for Transportation, a leading national transportation policy think-tank based in Washington, D.C. Prior to that he led the National Transportation Policy Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center and has worked as a consultant for Parsons Brinkerhoff (now WSP) and ICF International. Dr. Schank served as Transportation Policy Advisor to Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) during the authorization ofSAFETEA-LU and is also the co-author of All Roads Lead to Congress: The $300 Billion Fight Over Highway Funding. Dr. Schank holds a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from Columbia University, and a Master of City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He began his career working on behalf of the riders of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York City and has never lost that spirit. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two sons.
Andrea Cehaic
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