By Vicki Fanibi
In the bustling world of transportation, some individuals seem to be destined for greatness in shaping the way we move and connect. Veronica Davis, a prominent figure in urban planning and equity advocacy, is one such luminary. Most recently, she was the Director of Transportation & Drainage Operations for Houston, Texas and last year she published Inclusive Transportation: A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities, a call to action and a practical approach to reconnecting and shaping communities based on principles of justice and equity.
In our interview with her, Veronica shares her remarkable journey, revealing how her career path was intricately woven into the fabric of her family’s legacy and her own passionate pursuits. From her early days surrounded by the infrastructure of transportation to her pivotal roles in government agencies and community development, Veronica’s story exemplifies the intersection of fate, determination, and purpose. Join us as we delve into her experiences, challenges, and visions for a more inclusive and accessible transportation industry.
Q: What led you to a career in transportation?
A: I was actually born into it. I often tell the story that my mother literally went into labor outside of the Department of Transportation’s building. My dad worked for the Urban Mass Transportation Administration (UMTA), which is the Federal Transit Administration’s (FTA) predecessor. My mom went into labor outside the building and, fortunately, made it across the Potomac into a hospital — so I was born in Virginia. My dad was in the transportation industry and worked as a civil engineer and a planner. He focused mostly on railways/public transportation, which is why we moved to New Jersey, so that he could work for the Port Authority of New York New Jersey. Later he worked for the railroads and then he worked as a civil engineer, so I was just always around it. My mother worked for the New York City Transit Authority, and between the two of them, I was at one of their jobs. So it was one of these things that even if I wanted to out run it, it would find me. So that’s how the foundation, or the seed was planted.
When I was in high school, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was very good at math and science. I wanted to get a business degree, but at the prompting of my dad, realized I didn’t know what I could do with a business degree. Then I was interested in attending Julliard as I had been dancing most of my life, though I probably wasn’t good enough for Julliard, but I still wanted to attend. So I really didn’t know.
My dad suggested I apply for engineering, so I applied to schools as “Engineering Undecided.” I enrolled at the University of Maryland as an engineering major — undecided. Freshman year, we had a chemistry class that was so hard and I walked out of the first exam saying, “What can I declare that I never have to take another chemistry class?” That’s when I declared “Civil Engineering.” Even with that decision, there was still a bit of a gap. Junior year, I had an introduction to transportation class that I found pretty cool. At that point, I declared transportation as my focus within Civil Engineering. It was a long, circuitous path. In some cases, it felt like it was fate and I kept trying to outrun it. But fate was saying: “Nah. You’re built for this. You’re made for this.”
Q: What was the role that finally made you “succumb to fate?”
A: My first role. I had worked summer jobs, mostly in construction. My first job, ironically, was a construction management job, but it was at National Airport in DC. I worked on the transformation of the old Delta wing into the Authority’s building (which has since been demolished for another terminal). I got a chance to work airside on some pavement estimates for the active airfield, which was cool.
Then, I had my next internship between my first and second year of graduate school at the New York City Department of Transportation. It was in the Office of Private Ferry Operations. This happened in the summer of 2002, so immediately post-9/11. NYC was still sorting through debris and rubble at the World Trade Center. On the day of September 11th, people managed to safely get home using the ferry system since the subways were shutdown, but the ferries were not. Afterwards, as a result of its role in the day of September 11th and not wanting to use the subway system, many people decided to ride the ferry daily. This caused a major increase in ridership, so the Office of Private Ferry Operation was looking to expand some of its terminals to handle the new riders. I did analysis of ferry ridership to different venues.
My first career role was at the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) in the professional development program, resulting in me being stationed out of its DC headquarters. But through the program, I had the chance to move to the North Carolina division in Raleigh, the Maryland Division in Baltimore, the Houston office with the Houston-Galveston Area Council, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Ann Arbor in the Office of Transportation and Air Quality.
Q: You’ve done a lot, but I am curious about the ferry job. Can you go into further detail about that?
A: I’m gonna tell you I knew nothing. I knew nothing about anything that had to do with the nautical world. So it was interesting to do this analysis, having been trained on the roadway. I could do an analysis of how to get from point A to point B on the roadway, but having to do it on the waterway was entirely new. I was like I don’t know how fast X amount of knots are. So I had to actually learn about ferries and their operations. It was an experience. I was trying to just do the feasibility of taking ferries to all sorts of places. What is the feasibility of getting people to an airport? Baseball games? We were looking at other means to get people to those places.
Q: What do you think it means to have women, especially Black women, underrepresented in the transportation industry? What are the impacts of this?
A: I think it’s a huge impact to have women, Black women, and other women of color in these roles, because it can have an impact if you bring your fullest self. When people look at decision-making roles, they think you just sit in your office issuing edicts of “we shall do this, then do this, and then this” … but it’s much more than that. Especially when you’re overseeing a transportation department that has operations and maintenance. I had 900 people report to me, 700 of them were frontline employees.
I’ll tell you a story and then I’ll get you your answer. One day, I was sitting in my office and one of Section Chiefs walked by my office, peeked her head in the door, and said, “Boss. This is you. We made it. We made it, boss.” I had this realization that I was the first person who looked like her to sit in that seat or be in that office.
It’s like Spider-Man. You know, with great power comes great responsibility. It’s very easy in these roles to make decisions in terms of convenience. It is extremely hard to make the right decisions. I hope that my employees felt like I did all I could do to push for them. People, externally, have had an opportunity to see the kinds of things I’ve accomplished. Internally, it was an investment in the frontline staff and centering them in all my decisions.
For instance, it was easy to use the language of “work from home and social distance,” but frontline staff couldn’t do that. They had to go from Point A to Point B in a vehicle. The number of staff I lost during COVID … I had to go to funerals. It’s tough. How do I center this particular group in my decision-making? Whether it’s pushing for higher salaries, better facilities, or even things around our drug policy. When I arrived, there was a zero-tolerance drug policy in the Department. I further investigated as to why, seeing as the City’s policy provides an opportunity for people to have a second chance. For some people, they were just using CBD oil and they got a positive drug test. It’s all about just reconciling all of that and using my position to make decisions that need to be made, as it relates to the Black community. So why can’t I give this employee another chance? I feel like this has been a good employee. Getting a positive drug test from using CBD oil does not make the employee bad. Being able to reconcile all of that is, to me, what it means to be in a position and use the opportunity you have to make the decisions that need to be made, especially as it relates to the black community.
We tend to say things like “marginalized.” Well, who is marginalized? Us? Marginalized is a passive-aggressive term. It leaves out the doer from the conversation. And it’s the communities that we have. There has been no investment. I can’t even say that there has been disinvestment, there has been nothing.
We had a project where, in the 1960s, the city had built a road through what was once called the Evergreen Negro Cemetery. And as part of a Federal project for the Houston Metro, we discovered the esplanade was part of the cemetery. Unfortunately, there’s evidence of at least 33 burial sites in the esplanade, of which there were three partially to fully intact remains that had never been removed. We planned to do DNA testing to see if we could find next of kin from public databases and go through the process of respectfully removing the remains. It’s easy to do that process as it’s required by the Feds, so we can take what was once a cemetery in the center of the road and make it into something else. But to be able to advocate on behalf of the community and the administration at the time, resulted in keeping these beautiful brick entrances and pieces of the cemetery intact, with wrought iron signs on the top that say Evergreen Negro Cemetery. I was not federally obligated to do that. But being able to work with the previous mayoral administration and to make that happen for the community means a lot to me. It doesn’t change what happened. But it is an acknowledgment of where the city messed up. We needed to tell the story of how it all happened, and it allowed us to bring some sort of restoration and acknowledgment to the cemetery that had been forgotten.
Q: What would you say is the biggest hurdle in achieving equity and inclusion in transportation?
A: The largest hurdle right now is you have an organized effort that is against those very things. You see it with anti-DEI. Any time a Black person shows up, there’s the assumption that they are a diversity hire. Any time something goes wrong, the theory is that it’s because of diversity hires. We all know that is not the case. There’s also anti-intellectualism. I will say that even just in my career, you could show people the data and there’d be some understanding. Now, you show people the data and they don’t care. They don’t believe you. They don’t trust you. They’re “smarter” than you. It makes it hard because you’re not able to have a conversation from a place of data and research. You’re having a conversation from a place of emotion.
I think that for advocates, we are going to have to come up with new language. Some of the language we have been using has already been twisted up for other things. For instance, in Texas, there was a bill that would prevent road diets. People have co-opted road diets, taken the data, and placed misinformation out there. And now there’s people that are against any and all road diets because all hell’s going to break loose and the sky is going to fall. The most pressing hurdle is we’re going to have to constantly move and adapt our language since someone is always using it in a way that is “not correct” or not how “we would normally phrase things.” We then get blamed for being condescending in our language. From an engagement perspective, it is just going to get harder.
Q: I live on Pennsylvania Avenue in DC, and it reminds me of when they put up the protected bike lanes. A lot of community members, specifically those who were in organizations targeted towards equity inclusion, were talking about how the lanes were going to gentrify the neighborhood. How cars couldn’t park. I thought, “what a fascinating turn of events to have the term gentrification be used within community development groups, as a way of pushing away actual beneficial development.” As we know, those who bike or primarily use alternative modes of transportation to get to work or school are largely people of color. It’s so interesting to me that we’re living in a time where black and brown community groups are not supportive of something as simple as a protected bike lane because that, in and of itself, is going to destroy their neighborhood. So I’m curious if you have any thoughts on things like that? What are the sources for that thinking?
A: It’s very complicated. Gentrification isn’t the right term, but we have seen that where there has been transit investment, a change of that landscape, it has led to a demographic change. Now this is where it gets complicated. Anyone who was a homeowner did have an economic benefit from it, but it’s hard because grandma sold her home because now she can’t pay the taxes based on the new value of her home. Or what happens if grandma died? Now you have the family fighting over this property. In lieu of trying to keep the property in the family, it gets sold and the family cashes out because grandma’s house was paid off.
For renters, it is a very tough situation. Landlords recognize they can now charge more rent, so renters are very sensitive to those things. Then you have just an overall higher demand to live in these areas causing rents to increase. I sit on the Advisory Committee on Transportation Equity with the United States Department of Transportation and we’re actually grappling with this. We know transportation and housing are linked, but we can’t seem to figure out how to link them. There have been programs between Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the US Department of Transportation (DOT), but they are not working together. And that’s really kind of the root issue. HUD has to be there and the funding to be there at the time that you make these transportation improvements. It’s very challenging. I think that is where the missing link is, particularly with lower income people. It’s really the working poor, where they are very housing unstable — just getting by and it only takes one issue and they are not getting by anymore. And that’s the problem. There is not any kind of programming for that type of person. These are the people who tend to be gentrified out. The transportation and the housing people have to come together and really, truly propose solutions, because that’s really what the challenge is.
Q: Hopefully this question is a fun one. What books or other forms of media do you recommend to someone who’s just starting out in the industry? What forms of media were pivotal for you?
A: There is a documentary that came out maybe a decade ago, Bikes vs Cars. It focuses on people who bike and the history of biking. The thing I distinctly remember about this documentary is that it talks about how Los Angeles had one of the most dense public transportation systems — even denser than New York City. The auto industry intentionally ran it into the ground, though. We all saw Who Framed Roger Rabbit! It really is a good documentary that explains how we got where we are as such a car dependent society.
Obviously, my book Inclusive Transportation: A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities! Of course there are other books I’ve read that were really good. Dr. Lawrence Brown’s The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America is about the history of how Baltimore was shaped through segregation and everything else associated with race. In fact, you could substitute Baltimore with pretty much any city where black people live. It just gives a framework of how did we get to where we are today, and then where do we go from here?
A non-planning book I highly recommend is Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. It’s a book I keep on my bedside. It’s not about being a billionaire, but one of the things it talks about is having your purpose in knowing your purpose. Having a true belief in your purpose. This is framed in parallel to Christianity by referencing having what people believed was a Savior. If this person is the Savior, they could have cured anyone but they didn’t. It was the people who believed. It was their belief in this person that is really what healed them. So the book talks about having this idea of purpose. And I say that as you move through your career, there’s going to be things that are going to be thrown at you. It’s easy and seductive to chase the money. I’ve done it. I’ve made decisions based on money. What I got from those experiences, though, was the recognition that I was in a place that wasn’t meant to be. Don’t chase the money. Really chase the things that you’re passionate about to really have joy in what you do.
Q: Last question. What would be your ideal vision of a just, fair, equitable, and accessible transportation industry or system?
A: When I think about what a just and equitable transportation system is, I believe it is when any child, regardless of what zip code that they are in, is able to navigate to the places that they need to navigate. They can navigate safely to school. They can navigate safely to parks. They can navigate safely to soccer practice. Specifically when I’m thinking of a child, I am thinking of a 10 year old — old enough that they have enough sense, but young enough that they are very vulnerable. So what does that mean? They can’t drive, so that’s out. You have to have a public transportation system that is reliable, safe, and clean. It means it has headways so a child isn’t standing outside for 30 minutes. It means that your sidewalks need to be wide with a buffer from the street. It means that people need to drive slower and not whizzing past a child that is walking or biking. It means that bike infrastructure needs to be protected to allow a child to move on a bike. To me, that is what it looks like and is independent of what zip code that this child is from.
