"As a kid, I was always interested in transportation. Aside from my fascination with riding buses, I was always asking my parents questions about things like how the traffic signal knows when a car is waiting or how potholes are formed. I landed in the public transit realm after realizing how important transportation options were after being without a car in college."

"I have always been annoyingly passionate about public health. I did my public health studies in Hong Kong and took a course called Social Epidemiology focusing on the social determinants of health: where we live, how we live, our relationships and how they impact our health. My public health career started in communicable disease prevention, but I kept thinking about how the design of our built environments can add or take years off our lives. Eventually, I went back to school for urban planning, so now I can be annoying about planning, too."

"I was a kid in a car-free household who wanted to design cars, and I became a bicycle courier, full-time engineering student, and part-time bike racer. Traveling outside of the U.S., I realized how our car culture fed our communities’ inequalities. That led me to fighting for bike lanes in underserved communities, heading up a bike education program in a low-income Black neighborhood, and growing a transit advocacy organization in Cleveland to lower fares."

"In high school, none of my friends could drive, and we lived in the suburbs, so everything was spread out. My best friend learned how to use the transit system in LA, and she taught me how to pay for the fare and which side of the platform to stand on to make sure we were going in the right direction. I remember looking at the route map and being blown away. There were so many places you could go using transit, and you could skip the atrocious driving downtown."

"Growing up in Colorado Springs, we’d often venture to Denver to see the 'big city.' At first, I was enamored with the scale and complexity of the highway system—flyovers and bridges everywhere. When the Central LRT line opened in 1994, it changed my perception of everything. Riding in a train to get downtown was profound, and I as I got older, I just wanted to understand how and why cities were the way they were. That led to the discovery of city planning as a profession, and I’ve been hooked ever since."

"I’ve always loved looking at maps and building plans. For a while I wanted to be an architect growing up, but planning appealed to me because of how interdisciplinary the field is. The balance between imagining what could be better about the world and determining what’s feasible to implement makes the work both challenging and rewarding."

"I've always been intrigued by the many varieties of transit vehicles, specifically buses, and as fate would have it, a mechanic for the local transit agency lived just a few houses away during my childhood. On most Saturdays, my neighbor Mr. Byrd, test-drove the Neoplan and Orion V buses that he repaired in the neighborhood. I have many fond memories of being in the driver’s seat and setting the destination roll-signs to the wackiest combinations. After realizing the connection between city design and transit, I completed undergraduate studies in an urban and public affairs program, and I take great pride in turning this childhood entertainment into a fulfilling transit career."

"I commuted via the E/F train from Queens to Manhattan every day in high school, so I’ve always loved trains. I went into college wanting to study climate change, and I realized the best way to address carbon emissions was to do everything possible to get cars off the road."

"I love to play with data, and I love critical thinking. So, I did my doctoral degree in econometric modeling using transportation data."

"When I moved to DC, I got involved in local transportation advocacy; I first sat on the citizen’s advisory committee for DC’s transportation planning board and then the Bicycle Advisory Council as a ward representative. I took my role in these groups so seriously; I was treating it like a job. And that’s when I knew that transportation planning was the logical place for a passionate planning (and biking) nerd like me. Nelson\Nygaard is a place where I can do what I love for work while helping people love how they get around."

"When my family first moved to the U.S., we relied on the bus to get around. I spent a huge proportion of my time growing up waiting to transfer to a bus that only came every 30 minutes. Seattle’s light rail construction also directly impacted my family. We had to close down our first restaurant in Capitol Hill, since it was right next to the station construction site. I know firsthand the power of public transit to improve access to jobs and social services, but also the harm of its unintended consequences. Transit can be a major environmental and economic solution, but only if it’s done right, and I would like to be a part of doing it right."

"I grew up in a very rural agricultural town, where the primary way to get around town was to drive. I would ride my bike several miles along dangerous roads to school or into town (meaning, the local CVS). I often dreamed of living in a walkable downtown area where everything was accessible without a car."

"Revisit soon for an origin story from our Vancouver team."

"Revisit soon for an origin story from our Toronto team."