New Adjunct Professor: Translink’s Michael Shiffer

The SCARP community is pleased to be welcoming its newest adjunct professor, Michael Shiffer, VP of the Planning & Policy Division of TransLink and former VP for Planning and Development at the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA). Michael’s exciting new course, Urban Mass Transit Planning and Technologies, filled up quickly and is now underway. I had the pleasure of interviewing our new prof on May 2nd, a couple days before the class started, to find out more about his connection to academia.

First of all, welcome! We have so many students here that are interested in transportation; we’re very excited to have you here. I’m curious, what has brought you to SCARP?

Actually, my passion for transit started when I was a kid. I grew up in a family without a car in Chicago so I developed an early appreciation for mass transportation -so much so, that my career objective was to drive that city’s elevated trains. It was only because the transit authority wasn’t hiring when I graduated high school that I continued my education –all the way to the Ph.D. level! Seriously, as a student, I worked in several transit call centers and that experience reinforced in me the importance of basic mobility for all sectors of the population.

As a graduate student in transportation planning, I was challenged by the gap between the analytical tools that planners tend to use with concepts the average person understands. My academic mission has been to develop mechanisms to bridge that gap using emerging multimedia technologies and public engagement processes. To this end, my nine month post doc at MIT ended up lasting nine years! Actually, the balance of that time was spent on the faculty teaching and running a small research lab there that focused on how emerging information technologies inform the way people discuss the future of their communities.

I was eventually recruited back home to Chicago by both the University of Illinois and the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA). I was supposed to work 90% at the university and 10% at CTA, but it turned out to be the reverse. It got to the point where I was enjoying myself so much as a practitioner that I gave up a tenured faculty position to lead planning for the CTA indefinitely. However I continued to teach throughout. And yes, I did eventually become certified to operate that city’s elevated trains!

Eventually I was recruited to the Vancouver region by TransLink. But I did not want to lose touch with my academic roots; I personally felt that that engagement between the academic world and the professional world was really critical and really paid off in a number of different ways. So when I came to TransLink I said that I would like to keep teaching and that’s what brought me here to SCARP.

That’s the long answer; the short answer to what brought me here today is the number 99 bus!

 Your new course starts tomorrow, what inspired you to teach “Urban Mass Transit Planning and Technologies”?

This is a course that I started teaching at MIT. When I moved to Chicago I offered the same course and really the intent was to give students a deeper appreciation of both the technical and policy issues that so many communities face with respect to public transportation. So basically this is a course I’ve been teaching for almost 20 years. But it’s different every year, with different issues in Boston, Chicago, and now here in the Lower Mainland.

I’ve included a number of field trips in the course, designed to be case studies to help students understand some of the issues faced by the agencies that provide these critical services. We’ll go to the central control centre for Skytrain to better understand how the system runs, we’ll look at the good, the bad, and the ugly in regards to transportation infrastructure, and we’ll also be seeing what goes on behind the scenes at the bus company including maintenance, service monitoring and scheduling. The course brings value to TransLink in the form of the relationships that we build with tomorrow’s transportation professionals and the fresh ideas that are generated from new perspectives.

Are you planning to teach any other courses?

This is probably all I can do for now. The emphasis of my course’s policy aspects often shifts year-to-year depending on issues of the day. So its flavour might change over time.  Beyond the course, there may be opportunities for collaborative research. For example, when I was with the CTA, we had about 6-7 MIT students every summer who would intern at the transit authority and then do theses that were directly related to issues and areas we worked on. They had both university faculty members and transportation professionals serving as dual advisors and a lot of these theses were very helpful to the overall transit industry. Everyone gained value from these. Perhaps this model could be replicated here, where students would gain a broader understanding of some of the complexities of transportation and, the transportation industry will gain value from fresh insights and as well as gain value from the potential talent pool.

As a person who’s spent a lifetime working on transportation issues, what skills and ideologies do you hope to pass on to our planners of tomorrow?

Well, I don’t know about ideology, but I would hope to help students who have a passion for transportation to further develop that and to make this a more sustainable region. It helps to be balanced; having interest in both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of this rich topic is really important so people will gain an understanding of these issues. It’s not just theory, its practice and understanding the challenges that we need to overcome –regionally, nationally, in North America, and in the rest of the world. There are plenty of really good and really poor examples of transportation in other parts of the world and it’s important to have an understanding of them. It’s best to have an appreciation of the multiple facets of transportation planning –urban design, logistics, mechanical, labour relations, policy, etc. –­ to maintain a good perspective. We have tremendous growth worldwide in mass transportation projects and a specialist in mass transportation will have an abundance of career opportunities.

To view the course syllabus for Michael Shiffer’s new course offered at SCARP, please see http://www.scarp.ubc.ca/plan548c.