How to start fixing Baltimore City’s Department of Transportation
This is my exit interview.
Three years after joining Baltimore City’s Department of Transportation, my last day will be next Tuesday. Because there seems to be little interest in an exit interview, I wanted to document what went well during my time here, and what could be improved.
We need to focus
Baltimore has a lot of issues. There have been books written about all of the issues in Baltimore (and beyond). Just for the Baltimore City Department of Transportation (BCDOT), we have been sued for not following the ADA, have leaders calling for tearing down the highway to nowhere, have a new Complete Streets policy, and the ongoing Central Ave reconstruction project.
We also have plans that we are trying to execute, such as the Transit Redevelopment Plan, the Druid Park Lake Drive Complete Streets Design Effort, connecting the Greenway Trail, and the partnership with the MTA on the East-West corridor project.
The problem is that we treat projects like shiny objects. We get excited about the latest project, which means that we are taking resources away from other projects that are in progress, and they end up sitting on the shelf. Not only does this waste BCDOT’s limited resources, but it can leave residents feeling distrustful of new projects.
We need to say ‘no’ sometimes
It feels good to tell residents that we will work on their problems. It’s easier to pass a council member’s email on to the planner who is loosely responsible for that kind of request than it is to tell them we won’t be able to work on that in the immediate future. It seems like the right thing to do to jump to attention when the Mayor’s office calls about something.
But its really just kicking the decision down the road. We have amazing employees that will try and bend space and time to make things happen, but there is nothing more demoralizing as an employee than to spend a lot of time working on a project that is supposed to be important, to only see it die on the vine when you hand it off to someone else who was not given the same priorities.
For example, one of the first projects I was assigned was to start TowStat because the Pulaski Tow Yard was nearly full. Former DOT Director Steve Sharkey started his time in city government in the CitiStat model under Former Mayor Martin O’Malley. The idea is that you identify a problem, use data to measure the problem, and then have regular meetings to generate action items to whittle away at the problem.
After sitting down with nearly every person in the towing division, it was obvious that the yard was full because there were cars that had been on the lot for years, the process to auction a car is long and complicated, and the towing system made it very hard to know when a car got stuck in the process. Before I even started, BCIT had decided that it was time to replace the system because it was over 20 years old, and was a security vulnerability because the city lost the source code when the original developer passed away years ago.
You would think this would be an easy win, but three years later, we are still using that same system, and the fix was to lease a new towing yard to handle the overflow. Despite the issue coming up in every TowStat meeting for two and a half years, there was never a push to get it complete. First, it wasn’t a priority because we had closed the tow yard for the pandemic. Then we had meeting after meeting about the requirements, discussing the same things every time. Then we stopped talking about it for about a year. The latest I heard was we picked a vendor, and now its going to plod its way through procurement.
Why didn’t it move faster? We had so many other priorities that we wasted uncounted hours task-switching between projects, and redoing work because projects got stale and had to be restarted.
This causes burnout
Its easy to think that Baltimore City is filled with people that don’t care. But that’s just not the case. I have seen so many brilliant, driven people who care deeply about the city. And so many of them have left after beating their heads against the wall. Adrea Turner was DOT’s Chief of Staff from January 2021-May 2022, and there are few people that I saw who were more willing to roll their sleeves up and break down barriers. She was actually the one that helped get the tow system replacement restarted.
But while that issue was being dealt with, we also had to deal with the Baltimore Police Department who seemed unable to give us timely crash reports so we could partner on a Stat looking at street safety. When I met with Sgt Paul McMillian, head of the Accident Investigation Unit in BPD, he said that part of the reason that the unit was unable to help us more was that the BPD had been defunded (the same month he made that comment, the BPD took $6 million from the department). DOT was more or less left to beg the BPD to share timely information with us, and we mainly had to rely on the once-per-year crash dump we got from the state. It’s impossible to really know how well your improvements are working if you might not get a January crash report until the summer, a year and a half later.
We have lost so many other great people, like two amazing data analysts on our Data Team, two heads of the transit division, a whip-smart head of towing, our Capital Planning Chief, and even the DOT director (who left with an afternoon email before a long holiday weekend).
How do we fix this?
The Mayor knows how to prioritize issues, and break things down. He did it last week with the Squeegee Collaborative Working Action Plan. Last year he did it with the Comprehensive Violence Prevention Plan. He also did it with the Action Plan on Homelessness. He even did it with his 100-day action plan and his transition report.
But we have to stick with those priorities, which goes back to being willing to say ‘no’ to things that are not in line with those priorities. For example, it feels good to bring traffic planners out to look at an intersection with residents, which also takes a huge amount of time that might sink another project that might help the whole city (and also tends to be a very inequitable way to deal with problems).
That’s really it. The solution is that if we start a project, then lets finish it. But actually doing that is the hard part. We need leadership that will stick to those priorities, and defend their employees from time sucks. It requires good project management that breaks down a project that might require different departments to work together, and to make sure it happens. It requires us to be looking forward to see what projects we should be undertaking. And it requires leadership to make sure people feel like their contributions are valued by seeing those contributions actually coming to fruition instead of falling on the floor.
Sometimes it feels like the city too quickly will blame Hogan for the way things are (and yeah, he has done a lot of damage). But things aren’t magically going to be fixed with him out of office if we don’t look at the ways that the Baltimore City government has gotten in its own way, or let wins turn into losses. We are leaving meat on the bone.
Why am I leaving?
Despite these issues, I was not actually planning to leave. Because of the way I was hired, I needed to be switched to a new position in the department. We knew this for the last year, and yet, my position is ending next week without any movement happening on getting me into a new position. In fact, the person that was working to get me in a new position was fired earlier this month (she was another stellar person that we should not have lost). I could apply for the position that finally came through, but I am just burned out.
Sadly, I am not sure that anything I worked on will actually make a difference after I leave. For the last year and a half, I have been trying to work with BCIT to get my dashboards, dataflows and tools moved to an account that is not tied to my user account. That also has not moved at all, so most of my automated tools will stop working when my account is disabled after I leave.
I have become a GIS analyst who hasn’t had a GIS license since Nov 1, and can’t even get BCIT to give me an idea of when that will be fixed. I am a data analyst that has a laptop that can barely run Powerpoint and run a Microsoft Teams screen share. But mostly, I am a Baltimore City employee that feels emotionally drained from this city that I love so much.
Good luck Baltimore. I will be rooting for you from a distance.
