essary piece of information, or even talk to a person.
Dealing with transportation professionals can bring a whole new level of frustration. For
example, your first interaction could involve an expanded or realigned roadway, which al- most certainly means that your community is about to be altered in a way most community members do not like.
DOT personnel are usually caught up in their perception of their mission. Having worked
inside a government transportation agency for more than three decades, and mingled with
colleagues from many other state, county and city DOTs around the country, it is clear
to me the transportation profession is too inwardly focused. On the whole, transporta- tion professionals do not pay enough attention to citizens in the communities where they
work. The profession’s performance measures relate to transportation goals, not commu-
nity goals. Concepts like free traffic flow, smoothness of pavement and viability of bridge
structures dictate most transportation decisions, and the needs of stakeholders and com- munities receive only lip service.
People’s frustration with DOT employees may be aggravated by the widespread lack of re- spect for public employees in America. Many believe that public employees are lazy and do not know what they are doing, and people often mistakenly believe that their salaries and pension funds are the major reason for tax increases.
Is it any surprise that many average citizens cannot resist the temptation to rip into the first DOT staff member who is found? A person may start out calm, but the first time they think
they hear “NO,” people lose control and get angry - sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes not.
Before resorting to this behavior, however, residents need to consider that engineers and
other DOT staff are people, too. They do not like being called names any more than the next
person. Even if the conversation is civil and name calling is absent, there can be an appar-
ent mood of hostility that undermines communication. This unspoken tension can incite a DOT employee to withhold anything but the bare minimum amount of information. The truth is that most public employees - including transportation engineers - have a
strong dedication to public service. Contrary to popular belief, they do not want their ac-
tions and decisions to anger people. They want to be helpful, which means that treating
them with kindness in your initial encounters will bring out the best in them.
instead of being instinctively angry, we should marvel at how thoroughly the transportation establishment delivered on its perceived mandate to provide americans with a system of high-speed and safe roads, sec- ond to none in the world. the industry created a common “enabling framework for progress” consisting of language/terminology; funding mechanisms; curriculum at universities; values; and policies. common professional organizations, such as aaShto, the transportation research board (trb) and the institute of transportation engineers (ite) were created to reinforce and standardize this framework. this was done at a scale that has rarely been matched by any other profession. is it any wonder then that the transportation planning in the u.S. that has affected the shape of our communities, has been dominated by transportation engineers? meanwhile, citizens, elected officials, planners and advocacy groups have been far less influential. the profession has managed to convince two generations of planners, politicians, developers, construction industries, special interest groups and the public itself about how planning should be done. the current task is to address improvements.
This does not mean that you will always immediately get
the answer you want from transportation engineers or feel that they are taking your concerns seriously. Several generations of these professionals have been groomed to
believe that wider, straighter and more ubiquitous roads are unquestionably in the national interest. The creation
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of indoctrination that insisted there was one and only one way to build roads - and that approach is still with us today.
Is this any different than a bank employee
who turns down a loan for a new small busi-
ness that might benefit your community, or a
hospital employee who turns away a patient without health insurance? In each case, the employee thinks they are doing the right thing according to the philosophy and guidelines of a powerful organizational culture. In the case of the transportation industry, engineers really were trained to believe that new, high-speed roads provided the greatest good to
society and were always justified no matter how much damage they did to communities. From my early years at NJDOT, I can still remember a director of right-of-way acquisition
who described the removal of 3,000 low-income homes from one of the state’s large cities as “using his surgeon’s scalpel to remove the cancer before it killed the patient.”
There is no guarantee that you will easily get the information you want by treating the DOT staff with respect. However, there is almost no chance that you will get anyone to listen to your concerns, or think differently about a problem, if you attack, demean or disparage them.