Message from the President

Dear ITE Southern California Members,

Thank you Paul Van Dyk for your presentation, Right of Way Watchers – The Popular Way to Diet Your Roads: How Long Beach Is Earning Support for Road Diets in the Car Culture of Southern California. He shared some great success stories on how to successfully implement a road diet project. I was particularly impressed by how the City achieved public buy-in with multiple strategic workshops. I think it serves as a great model for communities that are considering ways to enhance safety, mobility, and access for all road users at a relatively low cost.

I was not able to attend the ITE International Meeting this year, but I was able to catch up on some of the events by looking at the ITE Journal. The article that really caught my eye on this read was entitled Move over Millennials: Generation Z arrives at the ITE Annual Meeting and Exhibit. As a millennial, I promptly moved over and read what 16-year-old Peter Yu had to say. It was refreshing to see the perspective of a budding transportation engineer on their first visit to an ITE meeting. He spoke of some of the great technical content which included our very own Rock Miller’s discussion on speed zoning and the 85th percentile speed. Underscoring his experience was the feeling that ITE felt like a big family that he would certainly belong too. As our International Board of Directors proceed to push through the inertia of the status quo, we should remember that our organization is a community that needs to work together in a way that Peter saw in Minneapolis. Peter Yu’s experience wasn’t just as an observer. He presented on a new interchange configuration that he created, referred to as Double Offset-T Interchange (DOTI). It became clear reading through the article that Peter has an exceptional mind for someone his age. Cultivating this type of knowledge and interest in people of his age is important. The ITE Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Outreach Challenge was designed to recognize outstanding K-12 STEM outreach efforts. Please find ITE STEM resources here .

Lastly, I want to remind you all that we have an important election coming on November 6, 2018. You have heard a lot about SB 1 from us and other organizations in our industry. California has a backlog of $130 billion in needed road maintenance projects, and SB 1 gives us an opportunity to catch up. Proposition 6 would eliminate this funding and bring us back to the era of “kicking the can down the crumbling and pothole-ridden road."