Women in transportation?

OK, this is kind of dorky, but I've been working on a few projects in progressive transportation, and got to thinking about my rather large and unwieldy teams. It occured to me that the most interesting people I've been meeting in the gigantic transportation engineering firm, Parsons Brinckerhoff and in the New Jersey DOT are mostly women.

So this is where it gets really dorky. I started thinking that women might be the best people to break the narrow thinking that has plagued transportation engineering for decades now. I could describe the kind of stuff that we're working on as verging on New Urbanism, but to break it down even more, it's really is about just not building more roads for the sake of more roads.

It involves such earth-shattering things like another lane doesn't help congestion; the best towns have many points of conflict; there should be integrated land-use and transportation planning; there should be collaboration between state and local agencies. So obvious right? But this is still a minority perspective.

Anyhow, this is just something I've been keeping track off. Not only are the most interesting people women, we're also the ones doing all the legwork in these projects. In fact, the other most progressive male transportation engineer said of his involvement in the project, "let's keep it among us girls." I don't take it in a bad way. In fact, I think it might mark the beginning of not just a tranformation in what transportation will become, but also in who will be doing the best job of it in just another decade - women.