About Me
Thanks for reading! I am a professional transit planner based in Chicago, IL. I have a B.S. in Industrial Management from Purdue and a M.A. in Sustainable Urban Development from DePaul. I’ve worked at a mix of consulting firms and transit authorities, in both planning and operations positions. I think this gives me an interesting perspective on the world, and I’d love to share it with you! I also occasionally post videos on Youtube. Here’s my latest on my hometown’s streetcar!
What’s this page all about?
I’ve driven the bus. I’ve planned the bus route. I’ve been the bike getting passed way too close by the bus on its route. Between my personal and professional life, I’ve experienced transportation from a wide variety of perspectives, and I think that gives me an interesting point of view (I hope you find the same to be true).
You’ll see two types of post on this page.
I Hope This Helps👍🏽, a roundup of tidbits I’ve encountered that furthered my thinking about cities and life. From sustainable transportation, housing, and design to the social forces shaping our daily lives, I take a broad lens in this review. Whether you’re a planner, advocate, or just curious about the world around you, I hope you’ll find something here that resonates. Here’s a sample post
I Hope This Helps 👍🏽: BEBs and Letting Go
Welcome to I Hope This Helps, a weekly (ish) roundup of tidbits I’ve encountered that furthered my thinking about cities and life. From sustainable transportation to housing, to design, and the social forces shaping our daily lives, I take a broad lens in this review. Whether you're a planner, advocate, or just curious about the world around you, I hope…
Full length articles on issues related to pubic transit, urban transportation, urban planning and good governance. Here’s a sample of what to expect out of these posts:
Good Transit Is Simple: Lessons in Good Route Design
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Nadine Lee, the current CEO of Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART), was the keynote speaker at the 2024 Transport Chicago conference. The theme of her address; “It’s ok to be basic.” Nadine’s statement reaffirms what sometimes feels lost in my industry (I’m a transit planner). Against a backdrop of Tesla tunnels, autonomous Microtransit, and AI powered RO…
If you have a topic you want me to cover, please feel free to reach out. I’m here to learn and grow! Thanks for joining me!
Extended About Me
Hello! I’m Joshua, and I’m a transit planner based in Chicago, IL. I have a B.S. in Industrial Management from Purdue🚂, and a M.A in Sustainable Urban Development from DePaul😈. I’ve been working in the public transit space in some capacity for nearly a decade.
When I was in high school, I knew I wanted to do something involving cities, but I wasn’t sure what that meant. Armed with that information I entered the first year engineering program at Purdue, with an intent to go into Civil Engineering. After getting royally humbled by CE 297 (statics), I spared us all the inevitable bridge collapse headline and pivoted to Industrial Management while still taking as many transportation engineering courses as could fit in my schedule.
At Purdue, all freshman engineers are first year engineers before declaring a specific discipline in their sophomore year. In the first year engineering program, everybody learns the foundations of engineering thinking and problem solving, to be applied to whatever discipline they choose sophomore year. I’m not an engineer, but engineering thinking still underpins my thinking
In the summer between my freshman and sophomore year, I got my first job in transit, dispatching for a small transit system near my hometown. The system operated six bus routes that ran every 1-2 hours, plus ADA paratransit service. As a dispatcher, I made sure all routes were staffed, kept tabs on the timeliness of the fixed route buses, scheduled rides for the paratransit buses and manned the customer service line. This was easily 2 person, if not a three person job. Indebus could afford to hire one person. It was chaos. After that summer, I knew transit was the line of work for me.
Between my junior and senior year of college, I got an internship with CityBus of Greater Lafayette, the transit authority serving Purdue and the surrounding town. In this capacity, I wrote federal grant applications, did paper ride checks, tabled at public events, planned routes, conducted a bus stop consolidation, acted as the de facto sign foreman, pulled weeds and did whatever else I got roped into. When I turned 21, I got my Commercial Driver’s License and started driving transit buses part time while wrapping up my degree. Of the roles I’ve held in transit, bus driver has by far been the most formative. Beyond the hard skills required to operate a 36,000 lb tube on wheels though city streets safely, this role has taught me patience, empathy, grace and imparted an understanding of the human condition in a way no other experience has come close. The lessons I’ve learned behind the wheel still shape my decision making today in my role as a transit planning consultant.
I stayed at CityBus for a year after graduating, but eventually my now husband got a job in Chicago and I was off to the big city. When I first moved to Chicago, I struggled to find a job in planning, but I was able to put my CDL to use, driving for a charter bus company. I still work part time for them today, and having one foot in the private transportation space has provided an interesting lens to view public transportation over the past several years. One winter day, as I was driving a commuter shuttle between the Hancock Tower and the Metra commuter rail stations, I got an email from Connetics Transportation Group (now Nelson\Nygaard) offering me a job as a transit planning consultant. Aside from a handful of academic and professional programs1, there’s not really an established educational track for transit planning. Because of this, I often joke that consulting is the closest to transit planning school that exists. During my time at Nelson\Nygaard, I was able to work on system redesigns in Duluth, MN and Traverse City, MI, develop my skills as a transit scheduler in Jackson, MS, Madison, WI and Orlando, FL, and work on policy around bus stop placement and amenities in Stockton, CA, amongst other projects. Consulting is only as ethical as the consulting firm doing the work, but Nelson\Nygaard created an environment that truly allowed me to explore my interest and grow my understanding of the transit space.
I also started graduate school at DePaul University studying Sustainable Urban Development around this time. My undergraduate degree is a B.S. (Bachelor of Science) which taught me to approach problems from a technical perspective. My graduate degree is a M.A. (Master of Arts), which really helped me soften the edges. During this time, I learned to appreciate that the perfect solution in a vacuum might not be the most context-appropriate solution for a specific community.
After graduating from DePaul, I bounced around a few consulting firms, learning about transit specifically and consulting generally before landing at DB E.C.O North America (yes, the same DB that runs trains in Germany) as a rail service planner. I figured rail service planning couldn’t be much different than bus service planning (I was wrong). As it turns out, trains require tracks, and pretty much everything operationally falls downstream of that. If consulting is transit planning school, DB is where I picked up my minor in rail operations. Admittedly, I don’t use this knowledge much today (buses have my heart), but trains are super informationally dense, and I’m not upset to now know some of it.
It was also during my time at DB that I started this page. It started initially as an outlet to explore urban planning topics independently and grow my thinking as a practitioner of urban planning. After developing the platform I remain awestruck at how rewarding the experience has been. We’re living in a time of unprecedented change, where information can be created, processed and synthesized at breakneck speeds. Our capacity to maintain something like a current understanding of the world and the forces that are shaping it are integral to our sustained relevance as urban planners. I’m excited to share my understanding of my corner of the planning world with you, and I’m doubly excited to see what you teach me along the way!
I’m also a member of Strong Towns Chicago, my city’s Strong Towns local conversation, and highly encourage you to find and join a local organization pushing for the world you want to see.
Outside of planning, I like to call myself a musician. I’ve played the saxophone since middle school, and marched alto sax in the Purdue “All-American” Marching Band. This took me to Ireland to march in the Dublin St. Patrick’s Day parade, to Medellín, Colombia to march in “La Feria de las Flores” parade, and to Indianapolis several times for the opening ceremonies of the Indy 500. I still play the saxophone today, but mostly to a captive audience of two (my husband and my dog) at home. Recently, I’ve picked up the flute and have been trying to teach myself how to play it!
Substack, (the app that powers this publication), is actually a really cool alternative to doom scrolling. Check it out! Substack.com.
MCRP program at Rutgers, home of the National Transit Institute
