About Me

The haphazard trajectory of my career is perhaps the most useful and interesting thing about me. In 2004 I randomly moved to Atlanta, Georgia without a car and with a desire to form roots in a community. In the process I realized how transportation is the intersection of important issues- energy, environment, social and racial justice. Using graduate school to support my work with transit activists in Atlanta I completed a Masters of City and Regional Planning and a Ph.D in Civil Engineering from Georgia Tech.

After Atlanta I did a fellowship in Munich, Germany on mobility culture in megacities and then moved to Santiago, Chile to work for the Bus Rapid Transit Centre of Excellence. Through a convergence of factors I ended up in Boston and spent six years at the MBTA/Massachusetts Department of Transportation leading data and policy initiatives. Then I did a Leadership in Government fellowship working on a project on how transit equity changes are made in the relationship between agencies and communities.

My journey from community organizer to academic researcher to public agency administrator with stops in Europe and South America helps me contextualize public transport within changing political frameworks. I use this experience to build interdisciplinary and community-academic-government collaboration to restructure public transport and urban space with an explicit focus on equity and mobility justice.

Please contact me at laurelintransit {at} gmail if you are interested in my work.