I work for You!

When people ask me what I do, I often say "I work for you," which often creates a brief moment of confusion before I explain that I work for the state. Kate thinks I should I just say, "I work for the state, so I guess I work for you."

Anyways, with the Government shutdown entering week 2, I'm not working for you, at least not formally. However, when I am working, my job is to help plan the future of transportation in the state. I'm planner in MnDOT's office of statewide multimodal planning, and we both lead planning efforts and help improve planning in general at the department.

Some of my projects have included a report examining lots of options for sustainable funding and an overview of how we plan for various types of transportation, but my primary role at the moment is managing a visioning effort called Minnesota GO.


Minnesota GO is an effort to create a long-range vision for transportation in the state. It's the first step in updating our 20 year transportation plan. Transportation projects last a long time (20 years for a typical road and close 100 for some bridges), so looking out into the future is kind of important. Yes, there are plenty of pot holes that do indeed need to be fixed today, but we also need to anticipate and prepare for major changes in the future:

• Aging of the Baby Boomers: will they all continue driving into their 80s?
• Rising and erratic fuel prices: will we continue to run on oil forever?
• Economic shifts: what will our economy look like in 15, 20, 30 years?
• Climate Change: will we have more floods, extreme heat days, etc?
  

You get the point.

You can help shape the vision at: www.minnesotago.org Hopefully, this budget crises will be resolved before too long and we can get back to planning for the future.