Open the Paths 2023: An Open Data & Transportation Equity Conference

Karen L. Braitmayer

Karen L. Braitmayer, FAIA is the founder and managing principal of Studio Pacifica, an accessibility consulting firm in Seattle. She and her team provide consulting services to local governments, school districts, architects, engineers, companies, and individuals concerned with complying with federal laws and state codes, as well as simply creating spaces that work for the unique needs of individual users. Karen also leads presentations and workshops around the country to further educate professionals about codes, standards, and inclusion.

Early in her career, it occurred to Karen that as an architect and a wheelchair user, it was possible for her to make a unique contribution to the field. Her professional focus on accessibility and her advocacy efforts for inclusion have certainly done that! 

As a registered architect, Karen was admitted to the prestigious College of Fellows by the American Institute of Architects (AIA). In 2010 she was appointed by President Barack Obama to the United States Access Board, a policy position that she still holds today. Most recently she was awarded the 2019 Whitney M. Young Jr. award by the American Institute of Architects in recognition of her leadership in civil rights for people with disabilities, social sustainability, public policy and universal design. In addition, Karen was named 2019 Person of the Year by New Mobility Magazine. Karen is also an active volunteer and non-profit board member.

Sally Swanson

Ms. Swanson, Principal of Sally Swanson Architects, Inc. has 45 years of experience in architecture, planning and accessible design and has managed her own award–winning firm since 1980. Ms. Swanson and her team have provided Transition Plans, Self-Evaluations, cost estimates, preliminary plans, and design and construction documents to help various public clients achieve compliance with Federal and California standards. 

Universal Design (UD) as practiced by Sally Swanson Architects, Inc. informs Global wayfinding solutions and creates public environments that are enjoyable, easy to use, and work for everyone at any age with or without a disability. The Global Wayfinding principles that relate to spatial planning include: key decision points, identity cues, prioritization of signage, nodes/hub standards and detectable keys to circulation. Over the years, Ms. Swanson has introduced special tools and a process that is time-tested, successful and contains scoping and technical requirements for accessibility to site, facilities, and buildings, with emphasis on providing full and equal access to all. These Global principles and guidelines promote better “access” to transit and public spaces for all users by improving practicality, comfort and feelings of inclusiveness. Ms. Swanson utilizes standards and Transit UD guidelines that she wrote as a member of the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) Urban Design Working Group to identify challenges that people with sensory and/or mobility impairments experience traveling to, riding and getting from transit. A Recommended Practice is an Action Plan developed by Ms. Swanson to implement Universal Design (UD) principles and concepts. Ms. Swanson’s process moves one successfully through a space without doubt, uncertainty or frustration. Ms. Swanson embraces assistive technologies that create solutions for transit environments and other public places. As a Paralympics Reporter accredited by the United States Olympic Committee, she has participated in developing accessibility standards from the Sochi 2014 Winter Paralympic Games, the Rio 2016 Summer Paralympic Games, the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Paralympic Games, the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics and Paralympics Games, to the Beijing 2022 Paralympic Winter Games. Ms. Swanson is also a member of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Subcommittee on Art and Design Excellence in Transportation. Through her pioneering vision, Ms. Swanson shows it is possible to significantly increase the level of accessibility for everyone including the elderly population and persons with disabilities. 

Deniz Turan

Ms. Turan has been utilizing GIS services since her undergraduate years. On every project Ms. Turan was assigned on her path to achieving a Ph.D. in Hydrology as well as her work beyond university, Ms. Turan found it increasingly helpful to present her findings on a GIS-based map with an embedded interactive database including every detailed element of information belonging to that project.

Ms. Turan is a naturally gifted GIS technician who is knowledgeable and skilled with ArcGIS and an individual who truly enjoys working with GIS systems. 

Ms. Turan’s day-to-day responsibilities at SSA include managing a team of surveyors to ensure timely and accurate delivery of technical reports, and assigning and supervising report tasks among the team members. Her expertise encompasses detailed Quality Assurance /Quality Control review and finalization of technical reports before submission to clients. 

The blending of GIS, database development and mapping brings Ms. Turan’s profound professional strengths to the fore to strategize and benefit each project. 

Elliott McFadden

Elliott McFadden is the Greater Minnesota Shared Mobility Coordinator at the Minnesota Department of Transportation where he leads efforts to pilot and scale shared mobility services with public transit partners in rural and small urban communities in Greater Minnesota. He currently serves as the MnDOT lead for their Federal Transit Administration AIM grant award to build a regional Mobility-as-a-Service platform and Western Minnesota COVID-19 Contactless Payment pilot. He also helped lead MnDOT’s FlexPass parking and transit pass project at the ABC Ramps in Minneapolis in partnership with the University of Minnesota.

Elliott is a recognized leader in the shared use mobility industry with over 18 years of experience bringing innovate solutions to market in the transportation space. Before joining MnDOT, he founded and managed the first car sharing service in Texas and served as the CEO of Austin B-cycle, the City of Austin’s bike share system, for six years where he launched and grew the system from 11 stations to 76 stations using federal, local, and private funds, set national bikeshare ridership records, recorded over 1 million trips, and innovated with electric bikes and the first U.S. deployment of seated scooters in partnership with OjO Electric. During that time, he was a co-founder and board member of the North American Bike Share Association, the trade association for shared micromobility.

Matthew Weidner

Matthew Weidner leads strategic planning and systems analysis for King County Metro’s demand responsive transportation (DRT) practice. In this role, Matthew leads the agency’s DRT research and spearheads translational technology initiatives to turn theoretical research into operational reality for DRT. He also advises the agency’s DRT strategic technology direction and guides its investment in innovative and emerging mobility programs. With nearly 20 years of experience in the industry, Matthew shares his expertise through numerous transportation and technology committees across the United States.

Elizabeth Sall

Elizabeth Sall is a Principal at UrbanLabs LLC a mission-driven urban science and research firm.  Ms. Sall specializes in the intersection of policy with data and technology especially as it relates to travel behavior and multi-modal transportation data.  She is currently serving as the Mobility Data Team lead for the California Integrated Travel Project at CalSTA/Caltrans where she oversees a data interoperability portfolio which includes the Mobility Data Interoperability Principles, the Transit Operational Data Standard, advances to the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS), and making sure data interoperability is benefitting public agencies in a way that improves access for their customers.

Elizabeth is a volunteer with the Zephyr Foundation for Improved Travel Analysis, the Chair of the Transportation Research Board Committee on Travel Forecasting and is a board member of RMI. She has Civil Engineering degrees from North Carolina State University (B.S.) and the University of Texas at Austin (M.S.) and loves walking and paddling around Seattle in the summer and playing in the mountains and biking around near her (temporary) current home in Leavenworth WA.  She is an avid rider of the KC Metro 44, Sound Transit 512 (RIP), and the Link Transit 22.

Maggie Cawley

Maggie Cawley currently serves as the Executive Director for OpenStreetMap US. She joined OSM US in March 2019 after 15 years as a geospatial professional with experience across all sectors and industries, with a focus on sustainability and urban planning. As the largest collaborative, freely editable geospatial database of the world, OpenStreetMap sits at the intersection of open data, private industry and government services and has a wide spectrum of stakeholders. In her role, Maggie works to engage, support and grow OpenStreetMap and its community across the United States through advocacy, education, and events like the annual State of the Map US conference.

Steve Yaffee

Steve Yaffe (Yaffe Mobility Consulting) oversaw planning and operations for Arlington County’s local fixed-route and demand response transit (sharing practices from both modes). He has prior fixed route experience with RT Metro in Sacramento and Houston Metro as well as demand response experience overseeing WMATA’s MetroAccess service and planning for FASTRAN – Fairfax County’s consolidated human service transportation provider. He is a member of the Transportation Research Board’s Transformative Trends in Transit Data Committee, is a past member of the TRB Paratransit Committee, and co-chaired the 2022 and 2019 TRB International Conferences on Demand Responsive Transportation. He also was a member of the Fairfax Area Long Term Care Coordinating Council and the board of the ENDependence Center of Northern Virginia, a center for independent living. He is a contractor for Easterseals and a grants manager for the National Aging and Disability Transportation Center – www.nadtc.org. He also moderated the recent Global Mass Transit virtual session on Planning and Integrating Microtransit in the Mobility Ecosystem.

Taylor Reich

D. Taylor Reich leads the data science program at the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, an NGO promoting sustainable and inclusive urban mobility across the Global South. Their work includes Pedestrians First, the first-ever worldwide atlas of walkability measurements. More recently, they collaborated with UC Davis researchers on The Compact City Scenario: Electrified, a global model of potential greenhouse gas reductions from electrification and modal shift in urban passenger transport. Before joining ITDP, they studied housing policy under a Fulbright fellowship in Amman, Jordan.

Anat Caspi

Dr. Anat Caspi designs for the fullness of human experience, guided by the belief that designing for heterogeneous populations of all abilities requires participatory design, qualitative and quantitative mixed methods. Dr. Caspi develops sensor and mobile applications for accessible, personalized navigation and routing in pedestrian ways (visit Accessmap.io), develops emergent technologies for autonomous wheelchairs and creates automated methods for standardized accessibility mapping of the pedestrian built environment (OpenSidewalks data schema). Her research interests are in the areas of applied machine learning and contextually aware robotic systems. More at: https://tcat.cs.washington.edu/

Mark Hallenbeck

Mark Hallenbeck is the Director of the Washington State Transportation Center (TRAC) at the University of Washington (UW.) He is currently helping lead a large ITS4US project funded by USDOT that is defining and deploying a routable, open-source sidewalk network, designed to scale nationally. The project is building and deploying data collection tools, as well as hosting and publishing the data in an OpenStreetMap compatible format.

Kristin Tufte

Dr. Kristin Tufte has 25+ years of experience in data management research and implementation. She was a team member on the design and implementation of three novel research data management systems which impacted the data management industry in both parallel data processing and stream data management. She directed the PORTAL program, a data archive for the Portland, OR-Vancouver, WA region with direct impacts on both transportation system operations and planning. Dr. Tufte is currently the Data Management Architect and Lead for the University of Washington ITS4US project – the Transportation Data Equity Initiative. Dr. Tufte holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Jon Campbell

Jon is an Associate and Manager of Mobility Software with Arcadis IBI Group based in Portland, Oregon. Jon works on open-source software tools for trip planning and transit data management. This includes OpenTripPlanner (OTP), an open source, multimodal trip planning platform that has been used by transit agencies around the world. He has worked with agencies including TriMet in Portland, the ATL in Atlanta, and Sound Transit in Seattle to implement and enhance the OTP platform. Jon and his colleagues are currently working to augment OTP’s trip discovery and planning features with booking and payment integrations to form an open-source Mobility as a Service toolkit. Throughout his work, Jon is motivated to ensure that technology, software, and data can help foster equitable and accessible mobility options for all.