As I traveled to San Jose for the ITS America Annual Meeting last month, I couldn’t help but imagine what it was like for the people that attended the World’s Fair in San Francisco in 1915.  There were several highly-anticipated technological-marvels demonstrated.  The first was the C.P. Huntington.  Train enthusiasts in the audience may know that this was the first Steam Locomotive purchased by the Southern Pacific Railroad.  Non-train enthusiasts might recognize it if they’ve ever had the opportunity to read the children’s story, the Little Engine that Could.  The C.P. Huntington currently resides in the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento.  Built in 1863, the locomotive weighed 39,000 pounds.  According to the Museum, the C.P. Huntington became famous as a primary work horse in the construction of the transcontinental railroad.  Later it pull local passengers between San Francisco, San Jose and Hollister.  Starting in 1892 the C.P. Huntington became the symbol of the Southern Pacific Railroad, appearing in fourteen official events over nearly 100 years to mark grand openings and other important occasions. 

In addition to the C.P. Huntington, for three hours each day, the Ford Motor Company operated an assembly line inside the Palace of Transportation that produced a new automobile every 10 minutes. The Lockheed brothers took many fairgoers on their first flight by offering 10-minute hydroplane flights over San Francisco Bay.  And Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated the first transcontinental telephone call.  By the way, according to History.com, listeners in California heard a newspaper boy from New York read the headlines and play phonograph records – leading to what we know today as “hold” music.

Those exhibits demonstrated the best of what American’s were capable of.  They inspired generations of dreamers, inventors, engineers, scientists and more.  Those exhibits spoke to quality of life issues for American’s in ways that no technology ever had.  Now here we are 101 years later, in Northern California, talking about the greatest transportation technologies that the 21^st century has to offer.  We are talking about them, but what are we doing as an industry to inspire the next generation of dreamers, inventors, engineers, and scientists?  Our technology is smaller than ever, more digital than ever, more automated than ever, and more complicated than ever.  We need a skillfully diverse workforce of dreamers, inventors, engineers, scientists, designers, planners, programmers, integrators, technicians, maintainers and operators to achieve what comes next.  Those of you in the audience that are fans of the Game of Thrones will appreciate it when I say that Winter is coming and we’re not prepared.  Generation X and Millennials now outnumber Baby Boomers in the work force and the amount of Baby Boomers leaving the work force over the next 10 years will increase dramatically leaving a void in our nation’s technical workforce. 

So what do we do about this?

First, support your local ITS America, Institute of Transportation Engineers, and other representative professional society chapters and sections and encourage them to develop programs that support STEM.  This morning’s keynote speaker mentioned STEM but if you haven’t heard of it before it stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.  Hopefully I am telling you things you already know, but the US Department of Education has established the Committee on STEM Education (CoSTEM).  CoSTEM is helping the Federal Government target five STEM investment areas:

1.) Improving STEM instruction in preschool through 12th grade;

2.) Increasing and sustaining public and youth engagement with STEM;

3.) Improving the STEM experience for undergraduate students;

4.) Better serving groups historically underrepresented in STEM fields;

5.) Designing graduate education for tomorrow's STEM workforce.

The hope is that this work will lead to long-term solutions that keep STEM focused education in schools at all levels for ever.

Second, get involved with STEM activities at the college or university that you attended or another one in your area.  Without your experience and perspectives, educators and curriculum developers could miss opportunities to include nuances from our industry that help create transportation technology dreamers and inventors.  The Institute of Engineers is working with the American Association of State Highway Officials and the Transportation Research Board to create the Transportation Systems Management and Operations University Research Network.  The TURN, as it is affectionately known, will incrementally structure and enhance processes and tools for awareness and coordination of nationwide TSMO research and development.   The effort will seek to define an approach for dynamic and responsive national TSMO research agenda setting at the national strategic level.  The ITE Annual Meeting will be in Anaheim during the third week of August.  At the meeting, a session will be held that discusses TURN and develops a framework for moving ahead.

Third, engage technical schools and public safety training academies in your area to encourage them to develop training programs that will support the training operations technicians.  Regardless of what part of the industry you want to focus on, automation creates data.  Systems analyze data and create information.  Well trained humans have to understand how to interpret the information.  Humans have to use the interpreted data to make decisions and take actions.  Although we will focus on developing systems that support those decisions and those decision support systems will continue to become more sophisticated, we will still need humans to make the final implementation call in many cases.  We need technical schools to train operators and operations supervisors to have communication, logic, interpretative, and analytical skills and capabilities.

Fourth, be active with your employers and within your part of the industry to encourage the creation of real and meaningful retraining and career development materials for our existing workforce.  These opportunities have to be more than death by PowerPoint and spinning Prezi graphics.  They need to be hands-on and provide immersive training opportunities that educate, stretch knowledge and re-educate.   Adult learners of tomorrow will expect virtual training to be highly sophisticated with video game quality while also expecting high quality face-to-face instruction in environments that allow them to build social capital while expanding their knowledge base.  Merging ITS technology to create simulators and virtual training environments based on real data from actual events is a critical step towards that skillfully diverse workforce that we seek.  This includes supporting efforts to focus on recruitment and retention for our industry.

And fifth, never let politicians forget how important transportation technology funding is to our economy, our safety and our future.  The next Federal Transportation Bill and concurrent State Transportation Funding Bills have to solve the transportation funding mechanics.  Whether it is a VMT model or another model it’s clear that our current path will not be sustainable.     

I want to shift gears for a minute to discuss our role in supporting public safety officials with ITS technology, since it was the title of this session.  Like all industries I’m sure, we like to think that our issues are unique requiring unique solutions.  This may be true in some cases but for our closest partners, emergency responders, the story is quite similar.  Technology that captures video and sound and overlays it with activity reports and GIS-enabled data is changing the way emergency response occurs.  It’s changing everything from accountability to safety to news to information to real-time reaction.  We often talk about safety as a primary driver of advancing transportation technology.  A crucial part of the safety message is keeping first responders safe first.  Whether it is through the RESCUME project or sensor enabled vests, we have to keep responders safe.  The five issues that I laid out a few minutes ago are true in the emergency response community as well.  Volunteerism continues to drop, technology improvements continue to provide steep training deficits, and the amount of data created from incident response continues to change how, from a capability standpoint and liability standpoint, agencies support transportation safety and mobility goals.  So I would like to highlight one additional action item that I would encourage everyone here to take.

Sixth, support the emergency responders in your community.  Integrate them into your projects, into your dreams and into your inventions.  Invite them to collaborate.  Invite them to tell their stories.  Invite them to feel comfortable enough to share their data with you.  Invite them to be safer by working with you.  Show them your technology and explain how it can help them.

Thanks to ITS America for the opportunity to be part of the conference, thanks to Bob Murphy for inviting me to be part of this panel, and thanks to all of you for listening.