ITS Professional Capacity Building Program

Learning Testimonials

Tina Wu, AICP Senior Planner, Regional Transportation Commission Washoe County, Nevada
	Tina has over a decade of experience in transit planning, with transit agencies, and for the past ten years with Reno's MPO. She is the MPO ITS planner and also manages the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) project for fixed-route and paratransit service.

What particular ITS challenges do you face in your job?

First, often, planners and engineers don't speak the same language, so I have to learn how to speak the engineers' lingo and communicate with them in order to successfully implement transit ITS projects and assist with the regional ITS architecture. Second, there is a widely held belief that ITS is the magic bullet for all transportation problems, and once implemented, the systems do not require any ongoing maintenance. This is not the case. So, there's the ongoing need to educate both internal and external stakeholders about ITS — what it can do for them and what they need to do to maintain ITS systems.

What ITS training have you been involved in?

I've taken a number of classes through NTI and NHI. I've also taken advantage of the NTI Fellows Program to bring in expert, credible half-day workshops on a number of topics:

How has the training been useful to you? To ITS in the region?

The training has been invaluable. It's given me a tremendously important grounding in what has to be done to develop the regional architecture, and equipped me as a planner to be able to provide direction to the consultants and ask intelligent, informed questions of the engineers involved at the project and regional architecture levels. The NTI Fellows Program workshops have given our key stakeholders valuable, time-efficient training as well.