Resilient Infrastructure and Transportation Safety at ITE

The Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) International Annual Meeting took place in Philadelphia last week, drawing over 1,500 transportation professionals from across the U.S., Canada, and around the world. Among the keynote speakers was Dan Hennessey, the City of Santa Rosa's Director of Transportation and Public Works, who addressed the crucial topics of resilient infrastructure and transportation safety.

Joining Dan on the keynote panel were several distinguished professionals:

• Aimee Flannery, Global Technology Leader - Transportation Risk and Resiliency at Jacobs
• Paolo Bocchini, Professor and Director of Graduate Programs in Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Director of the Center for Catastrophe Modeling and Resilience at Lehigh University
• Ed Fork, Transportation Technologies Specialist at the Federal Highway Administration

Dan provided insights for his colleagues about the City's response to the series of wildfires and how our infrastructure, operations, maintenance, and engineering teams have helped the community respond. The discussion also included our collective and ongoing actions to increase our ability to respond to unpredictable events and the challenges of wrestling with our infrastructure needs compared to our operations and maintenance requirements. Dan also noted that the unpredictable occur at different scales and provided as an example that our focus on decreasing traffic collisions provides more reliability for community members, decreasing the need for more roadways to handle diversions.

This prominent event featured a diverse and forward-thinking educational program that spanned 14 themed tracks targeted at various specialties within the field, including planners, engineers, data scientists, and educators. This event underscored the importance of forward-thinking strategies and collaboration in addressing the challenges of modern transportation.