Fostering Partnerships to Grow a Business in Transportation

Susan Park Rani is being honored as a Transportation Ladders of Opportunity Champion of Change.

I am truly honored to be a White House Champion of Change and to have the opportunity to take part in this event.   

Like education, public safety, and health and wellness, transportation is a critically important bipartisan issue facing our nation. Moving goods and people to their destinations efficiently and effectively gives our nation the competitive advantage it needs to compete and thrive in the global marketplace today. This is an important and exciting sector of the economy where much innovation in planning, design, and project delivery is destined to provide a greater positive economic impact than in days past.

I began my career as a professional engineer/business owner when there were no female minority engineering firms in Minnesota. As a pioneer, I looked for creative ways to partner with other firms, engaged in trade and business association with the goal of making a difference in my community. I did not start out with the sole intent to create jobs, but today that is exactly what Rani Engineering is doing for our community.

From the start, I knew that I had much to learn about the business of consulting engineering and that I needed to find ways to get my foot in the door on new projects. Being a minority female owned engineering firm gave me both a challenge and a great opportunity. The opportunity was that given the economic development goals identified on federally funded transportation projects, we had a chance to compete and earn business.  Our company began by securing small contracts working as a sub-consultant to larger established engineering firms in the community. With time, we accumulated a growing list of successful projects and earned our reputation for quality work and name recognition. Successful project completion invited more invitations for greater participation on larger projects.  This also allowed our firm to establish trusted relationships and partnerships in the engineering and transportation community. At the same time, we sought to be active in both trade and business associations on the board level. Those organizations included St. Paul Area Chamber of Commerce, American Consulting Engineering Companies, MN, Association of Women Contractors and National Association of Minority Contractors.

Another important decision was to join the City of St. Paul Mayor’s taskforce established to engage with the businesses along the Central Corridor Light Rail Transit (Green Line) in developing a land use framework that would affect the project well before the design effort. This participation resulted in Rani Engineering being chosen to join the team that ultimately won the design contract. Since that time, we have had the opportunity to work on three major light rail transit (LRT) projects in the Twin Cities Metropolitan area and this gave us a chance to start and grow a rail signal niche. Future transit rail and other transportation improvement projects are expected, so we continue to work diligently to earn business, develop and deepen relationships and to grow within our community. 

Today we are a mature firm with over 20 years of history and unlike in the days I began Rani Engineering, there are many women owned and/or minority firms successfully navigating and thriving in the transportation consulting industry in our community.    

Susan Park Rani is Founder and President of Rani Engineering Inc. A DBE Certified firm specializing in Civil Engineering, Land Surveying, and Rail Signal Services.

Disability Rights, U.S. Transportation Priorities, and Even Climate Change

Marilyn Golden is being honored as a Transportation Ladders of Opportunity Champion of Change.

For over 25 years, I’ve worked on national system-change to broaden the civil rights of people with disabilities to transportation.

Pairing “disability” with the term “civil rights” may seem odd to some. The prevailing cultural attitude is that disability is personal; a medical issue. We call that “the medical model” and have worked for decades to broaden the public image of disability to take into account our relationship to society. We want everyone to understand that the prevailing heritage of isolation, segregation, and exclusion experienced by most people with disabilities in just about all human societies is not a function of our disabilities alone, but about how society treats us.

When I was growing up, segregation and exclusion of people with disabilities was legal. Segregated schools and institutions for people with disabilities had no requirement to provide options for integration. Few people could see what was happening clearly because everything was covered by the gloss of good intentions. The burden of dealing with the consequences of disability rested on the individual. Society had no responsibility to remove barriers to equality.

Leaping through the years to today, when buildings have ramps so wheelchair users can participate, when government hearings have sign language interpreters so deaf people can participate, when government programs send letters in formats blind people can use, and when schools properly accommodate all children with disabilities, the walls of prejudice and discrimination fall.

These changes did not occur because social institutions, on their own, chose to include us. They changed because a social movement, the disability rights movement, which is both profoundly original in its thinking and, simultaneously, as traditionally American as civil rights based on race and sex. In the disability rights movement, millions of ordinary men and women have asserted ourselves to demand dignity and our rights.

This movement succeeded in the 70s, 80s, and 90s to pass federal and state civil rights laws, the most famous, but far from the only one, being the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). These laws required the changes I named, and many others, too. They have enough teeth that historically-unwilling institutions—education, medical care, employment, housing, the commercial sphere (such as hotels, stores, and restaurants), recreation, and, of course, transportation—all made, literally, concrete changes to become inclusive.

This struggle is far from over. Too much health care remains inaccessible to people with disabilities; too many people are still institutionalized; and, in transportation, while much has changed, many battles remain. Many people in this movement spend long work days, weeks, and years to realize full equality. It is my true privilege and honor to work among them.

Lastly, let me point out that our movement’s struggles occur in a broad context of inequitable funding that forms the backdrop to our, and to all, discussions of public transportation in this country. The United States dedicates enormous amounts of funding to infrastructure and other functions that facilitate transport by automobile – $48 billion is proposed by US DOT for 2015, but only $17 billion for public transit.

These priorities inherently disfavor large sections of the population, including people with disabilities. All the wonderful public and private transit programs, no matter how well they implement the ADA, cannot truly fill this gap. Our country must stop neglecting adequate support for publicly funded transit; privately funded transit; and resources to make our streets, sidewalks, and the pedestrian environment work well—for travelers with disabilities and all transit-dependent populations, including people who can’t afford cars.

Moreover, spending on autos does not decrease climate change, another critical national priority for everyone; but spending on public transit can. 

Marilyn Golden is the Senior Policy Analyst at Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund (DREDF).

Transportation Drives Our Lives

Josh Baker is being honored as a Transportation Ladders of Opportunity Champion of Change.

The way we view transportation really needs to be about the people. Often times, we are focused on the actual vehicle, the bus stop, or the clearly visible identifiers of the service. Unfortunately, what this does is allow us to lose sight of what those devices are there for. Consider that when you look at a bus driving down the road at capacity in Los Angeles, or a subway pulling into a crowded station in New York, it is easy to see how much these services are needed. But it’s not always this clear. Rural areas provide transportation operators with an entirely unique set of challenges. As human beings we really have a hard time understanding what all of the needs are and how to solve them. This sometimes results in our having trouble addressing the needs of those living in more remote or rural areas.

How then can we help everyone throughout our great country when their situations or circumstances are so different, yet so similar in importance? Well I tend to look at it simply as a puzzle, a challenge that can often take months, years, or decades to complete. The approach is simple: Take pieces that are different shapes and work to fit them in and complement each other to form a complete picture. This takes time. When you sit down to try to work out the solution, you have to examine the edges of the piece, understand their curves or sharp angles, then move them around until you find a suitable fit for them. Patience like this is a key part of ultimate success in driving change and in the advancement of transportation. Solving the puzzle is what we did in Radford. We looked at the situation, identified how it was unique and needed to go together, then sat down together to figure it out. Moments of frustration are inevitable and tension is sometimes present, but in the end the reward is priceless. When you get those pieces all snug and meshed together, well you have quite the impressive picture.

I was fortunate in this project to be part of a very special organization with an incredible and special mission: to make a difference by changing lives. New River Valley Community Services (NRVCS), as its name implies is all about community service. From the individual needing special assistance to live their life, to the person in crisis who just doesn’t see how they can go on living, NRVCS is about helping others, something easily complemented by our unique and expansive transportation services. With this background and considering the folks I work with every day, partnering with the City of Radford and Radford University to launch Radford Transit was a clear step forward in helping to succeed at our mission.

It’s easy to talk about what you do and why you do it, but it’s difficult to know where to start and where to end. With that said I will sign off with some personal thoughts to anybody who might be out there reading this. When you look at your interests, goals, and desires, always remember that with enough focus and drive you really can accomplish just about anything. That’s the beauty of the American way. We (as a nation) don’t just sit back and wait for something to come to us, we make it happen and we do it best. I’m proud to be a citizen of the United States of America and honored to have been selected as a Champion of Change. For all of us, service to our country should be first and foremost in our minds every day, enhancing lives and being a champion of change is not something isolated to one person or a small group of people… it really is in all of us.

Josh Baker is the General Manager of Radford Transit and the coordinator of all Facility and Transportation Services for New River Valley Community Services (NRVCS), a public provider of behavioral health services to residents of the New River Valley in the Commonwealth of Virginia.