Q&A: Leslie Richards, Professor of Practice in City & Regional Planning

Once described as a “battleship turner” by Philadelphia magazine, Leslie Richards served as secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) and subsequently led the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA), where she oversaw a $2 billion budget and a network that connects over five million residents in Greater Philadelphia. Having earned her Master of Regional Planning degree from Penn in 1993, she was the first planner and first woman to lead PennDOT. She returned to Penn in 2020 to teach in the Department of City & Regional Planning.
 

What are you teaching this semester?

I teach The Practice of Transportation Planning: Crafting Policies & Building Infrastructure. We look at policy and funding from the federal, state, local level: Why some projects get done, why some projects don’t get done, who are all the stakeholders—who are the decision makers? Each time I teach the class, it’s a little different depending on the student’s interest. They vote on what type of experts they would like to hear from. So, one year there was a huge interest in automated vehicles. So I brought in Nat Ford who was running the Jacksonville [Florida Transportation Authority, and they had just put in an automated vehicle shuttle running through their region. I’ve brought in experts who run airports and port experts. This year there’s been a big interest in FIFA 2026 [the world’s premier soccer competition] so we’re going to bring in Meg Kane, the head of Philadelphia Soccer 2026. We always have someone from the federal level, usually the regional administrator from the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), Terry Garcia Crews. I’ve brought in former DOT secretaries and others who face funding challenges. Sometimes, around the fifth or sixth class, I feel like I break a lot of hearts when I start to tell people why certain programs would never move forward.
 

How has the course evolved?

The first year I taught was January of 2020. So, we went to remote learning early in the semester. I also was learning how to run a transit agency as COVID was coming around us. I’ll never forget my very first time that everyone flipped on their cameras and behind almost every single student there was a SEPTA vehicle. They were so supportive and so I was very, very honest with them, letting them know what I didn’t know and what I was trying to figure out. It was so wonderful to be able to be my full self in front of them and let them know that leaders don’t always know everything, things don’t always go according to plan. Of course, there wasn’t one transit CEO in the entire world who knew how to lead during a global pandemic. We were all learning it together. And so that class was very, very special.

“No matter what you know, unless you can effectively convey it to others, it’s not going to help.”

What skills are you encouraging students to build?

I’m always highlighting the importance of communication—that no matter what you know, unless you can effectively convey it to others, it’s not going to help. I think it’s really important for them to know that any person in that class, just like I was in that class three decades ago, can run a large agency—and trust me, that’s not what I saw myself doing 30 years ago! If you figure out what you’re passionate about and figure out what it is that you want to do, the sky is really the limit.

One thing that always would bother me, when I became the first female Penn DOT secretary, was when young women would come and say, “That job’s so hard, why do you do it?” And I said, “It is my job to make sure that all of you want this job when I’m done. Because I get to do things that I never dreamed I would get to do. I get to help build bridges that cost a billion dollars. I get to put in new intersections and roadways and work with communities to help their quality of life.” These are things I never imagined that I would be able to be in the decision-making role for. I want everyone to consider all the options that are out there, including running a large agency, especially now with all the uncertainty that’s happening right now at the federal level.
 

What stands out from your tenure at PennDOT?

First of all, being part of the team of DOT secretaries or directors or commissioners [they have different titles in different states] is special because you don’t get that job unless a governor appoints you to that job. So, everybody has some type of interaction. Some have come up through their DOTs and some have managed school districts. When I was there, I was one of the only planners, and I was the first planner ever to run PennDOT. We put planning positions in PennDOT for the first time ever, so we have planning projects and money going to planning projects. We have engineers at PennDOT reading comprehensive plans and economic development plans so that the PennDOT projects actually are what the community wants and needs and have planned for. People see PennDOT as an asset to them in getting to where they want to go instead of a pain in the neck and just causing construction.

It was the same at SEPTA. I created the position of a chief planning officer. We had a planning department that did scheduling and route optimization, but we did not have a chief planner that made sure that we took into consideration stakeholder engagement and planning facts. That’s where our wayfinding system, our trolley modernization system, started to get discussed.

To go back to the communication piece, one thing I think planners are so good at is asking “Why?”—“Why are we building? And who are the people who are going to benefit? What are the opportunities people are going to have once this project is done?” At community meetings, it’s easy to get lost in things like, “What materials are you using?” and “How quickly can you get it done?”
 

You recently spoke at a conference about the role of AI in transportation. What do you see as the biggest opportunities?

I see lots of opportunities. Some transit agencies are already using AI. In New York, for example, they’re using AI to help with track maintenance. In large transit agencies like SEPTA, some of the track is over a hundred years old. To be able to have eyes on every single inch of track every single day is a big challenge. In New York, they are using AI with cameras that are on their revenue vehicles. Through the sound of the wheels on the track, they can pick up whether there may be a weakening in the rail, whether there may be something that chipped off, whether the wheel isn’t turning correctly, and then they can send the people to inspect it. So, it’s allowing maintenance work to happen in a much more aggressive and proactive way.

AI is also helping with new bus networks—route optimization—making sure we understand our riders better, that our routes are running on the frequency that they need, as well as into the neighborhoods that we need and where it needs to be.

There are some projects using cameras on vehicles, working with parking authorities and cities for writing tickets—a camera captures your license plate in a place where your car shouldn’t be, whether you’re double-parked, you’re on the median, you’re in front of a bus shelter, you’re in a bus lane. Hopefully, that allows buses to travel a lot faster, stay on schedule and be more reliable, which will increase ridership.
 

Are there other technologies that you’re following that you’re especially optimistic about?

One is being developed by a graduate from Penn, someone who I had the fortune of teaching. Jeff Stade (MUSA’20) and his team are taking a look at providing comprehensive commuter benefits in a streamlined platform. Their company Jawnt was integral in supporting the work that allowed the City of Philadelphia to provide free transit to city employees and residents living near or below the poverty level.

“One thing I think planners are so good at is asking ‘Why?’—Why are we building? And who are the people who are going to benefit? What are the opportunities people are going to have once this project is done?”

On the subject of innovation, you earned a reputation for bringing positive change to transit and transportation. What’s your secret?

First of all, I love to listen to people’s ideas. I’m a very curious person, so always I love to learn. I always say, “It’s not my job to come up with all the great ideas, but I can recognize a good idea when I hear one and I can help somebody build off of that idea.” And I trust people. When I came to PennDOT, that was the first time I worked at PennDOT. So I knew that I didn’t have all the answers. I needed people’s help. And so I listened, and I listened to people who had worked there for 10, 20, 30 years. When you work at a job that long, you have some ideas: How can we do things better? How can we get certain projects across the finish line? How can we save money? How can we save time? What type of work is being done that we don’t really need anymore?

I found at PennDOT, as well as at SEPTA, our employees had great ideas. I’m very proud that at SEPTA, we now have a transformation office. They receive ideas from our employees at all levels, and they look into them to see: Where can we save money? Where can we save time? Where can we do things better? Already they have saved tens of millions of dollars every year on those things. We have such limited resources in these large agencies—limited funding, limited workforce, limited tools—that it’s the only way we’re going to advance.

How did you come to planning and to transportation?

I knew I wanted to make a difference in people’s lives; I wasn’t sure how. When I was an undergraduate [at Brown University], I was taking all of these different courses—statistics, economics, sociology, architecture—and I wasn’t even sure how they fit together. And then I started looking at multidisciplinary majors and I found urban studies. For graduate school, I was interested in focusing on regional and  environmental issues, When I found the Penn program, it was one-third landscape architecture, one-third Wharton and one-third city planning. And there was a flexibility to incorporate regional and environmental research, which was very attractive to me.

[After graduation] I worked for the EPA, the [Philadelphia] City Planning Commission, and the Central Philadelphia Development Corporation. I had three kids, and was stay at home mom for eight years. And then I interviewed with an environmental consulting firm, thinking I would do water quality or air quality, because that’s what I had done at the EPA. They had just won the design contract for the last piece of I-95, which was in Bensalem Township in Bucks Country, and the person who was leading their public engagement was unexpectedly moving. They saw that I enjoyed talking about projects, that I have a knack of reading technical drawings and explaining it to people who don’t have a technical background. So, my very first job was the public involvement of one of the largest transportation projects in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and I fell in love with it.
 

What’s the most gratifying about being back at Penn, but on the other side of the classroom, so to speak?

I love being back on a campus. In my last several jobs, I didn’t have the time to walk across a campus. If I had a meeting, I’d always have to find the fastest way to go! There was no downtime. Now I have time to have lunch with people and just talk.

And it feels just fantastic to be with other people on the faculty who are so passionate about their work—to be able to share ideas and bring a practitioner’s perspective. I am really enjoying our conversations, and trying to figure out how research can get into practitioners’ hands faster so that they can utilize it. And how can practitioners help researchers do their work, so it can be tested and get out into the world.