Doing a “distant” transportation plan

As a boy, Eric Plosky ’99, MCP ’00, rode the New York subway with his grandmother to all the attractions of the city on the map. “When someone asks me how I got into transportation, they always ask me,‘ How did you get out of there? ’” He says. “Every little kid seems to love trains and subways, buses, cars and planes, and for some reason they ‘grow up from there.’ I never did.”

Now, as head of transportation planning at the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center in Kendall Square, Plosky and his team worked to rethink what transportation could be like. “It’s not just steel and concrete. It’s about people, it’s about making decisions, it’s about history and culture, ”he says.

At MIT, Plosky earned two degrees in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning; he also took humanities courses and wrote for The Tech. The internship at the Volpe Center turned into a 20-year career.

Although part of the U.S. Department of Transportation, Volpe is funded through direct consulting projects with other agencies and private organizations seeking unconventional solutions to complex problems. His team’s recent projects include Yellowstone National Park and Wright Brothers National Memorial autonomous vehicle systems; study of the national motorway network of agricultural goods; and numerous efforts, funded by the Millennium Challenge Corporation, to alleviate complicated urban transportation systems in places like Kenya and Sri Lanka. “Every time someone talks about a weird remote transportation project, no one knows anything, so we get involved,” Plosky says.

After Hurricane Katrina, Plosky spent months working with affected communities in Louisiana. The guidance documents he wrote since then became part of the National Disaster Recovery Framework, which has helped guide covid-19 recovery efforts. “Putting things as they were before is just a matter of restoring that; real recovery requires something else, ”he says.

After the job, Plosky teaches sustainable transportation classes at Harvard Extension School, works as a judge for the Lemelson-MIT Student Award, and directs first-year MIT Terrascope students. He also writes, publishing a series of stories every day on the Infrequent.com website.

Plosky said he feels a greater push at the federal level to address infrastructure challenges that exacerbate racial inequality and climate change. He says, “I am really hopeful that we will get a transportation system that meets the needs of today and tomorrow, rather than what was perceived yesterday.”