Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology

The intent of this study is to assess the readiness, resourcing, and structure of public transit agencies to identify, protect from, detect, respond to, and recover from cybersecurity vulnerabilities and threats. Given the multitude of connected devices already in use by the transit industry and the vast amount of data generated (with more coming online soon), the transit industry is vulnerable to malicious cyber-attack and other cybersecurity-related threats. This study reviews the state of best cybersecurity practices in public surface transit; outlines U.S. public surface transit operators’ cybersecurity operations; assesses U.S. policy on cybersecurity in public surface transportation; and provides policy recommendations that address gaps or identify issues for Congress, the Executive Branch, and the public surface transit agencies. Research methods include an online survey of public surface transit professionals in the United States and oral interviews conducted with members of the Executive Branch (e.g., U.S. Department of Transportation, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, The White House, and others), as well as research of literature published in periodicals.

One way to ensure broad organizational support of strategic management efforts is to include employees in strategic planning. An inclusive strategic planning process can spur creativity and innovation and increase organizational commitment to implementing change and has been shown to improve employee satisfaction, productivity, and retention. Crowdsourced strategic planning engages employees by using techniques traditionally used to engage external stakeholders. Turning these tools inward provides opportunities for a broad range of employees to develop a shared vision of a desired organizational state and to identify, develop, and sustain strategies to achieve that vision. This paper describes the design, implementation, and immediate outcomes of a crowdsourced strategic planning process at the U.S. Department of Transportation John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, a research-based public agency. The strategic planning process engaged about one-half of the workforce and resulted in the identification of more than two dozen employee-generated strategic initiatives, of which nine are currently being carried out. By providing employees a platform for expression, the process also had the unexpected benefit of generating information about the concerns and aspirations of employees and the fundamental organizational conditions required to manage change. In this way, crowdsourced strategic planning supports strategic learning; emergent strategies are identified and deliberate strategies are adapted to address the organizational vision expressed by employees.

Small towns and cities near national parks, public lands, and other natural amenities throughout the West are experiencing rapid growth and increased visitation. These “gateway communities” comprise a significant portion of the rural West, constituting about 31% of all communities and more than 60% of those under 25,000 people. Our prior NITC-funded research shows that growth and increased tourism create a range of “big city challenges” for gateway communities, particularly a significant increase in housing prices, which pushes the local workforce to outlying areas and other rural communities. As a result, despite being small towns, many developed gateway communities have large commuter sheds and more employees who commute into the community than employees who live and work in the community. Our observations suggest this rural gentrification and its related spillover effect results in longer worker commutes, higher transportation costs, and impacts on transportation infrastructure, land use, access to opportunity, mobility, equity, and quality of life in these rural towns and cities and the regions around them. Our observations also suggest this trend has intensified in the last year and is now rapidly playing out across the rural West due to COVID-19, which has expedited amenity migration and resulted in the “Zoom Town” phenomenon of remote workers relocating from high-income urban areas to rural towns and cities. While we have plenty of anecdotal evidence that this is happening and creating profound impacts throughout the rural West, our understanding of these dynamics in gateway communities and appropriate solutions for addressing them was limited prior to this study. To address this gap, we examined the extent to which gateway communities throughout the West are experiencing interconnected housing, transportation and land use challenges, and how increased visitation and growth affect these issues. We also explored the innovative things these communities are doing to respond and what can be learned from their experiences for small and large communities throughout the country. We did so by conducting a regional survey of western gateway communities; in-depth case studies of four gateway communities that are “out front” in experiencing and/or responding to these issues; and a series of workshops and informal interviews with gateway community representatives from across the West. We also used Census data to map commuter sheds and explore growth and development trends in these places. This report shares the key descriptive findings from our study.