Job job job
I've had a real job for like two weeks now!And I'm enjoying it so far, although I've mostly just been reading stuff and getting orientatated. (I have another full-day employee orientation this Friday). The Planning Division of the Greensboro Department of Transportation seems to be a good place to work, and I work with a good bunch of folks.* So far, I've read the 2030 Long Range Transportation Plan, the upcoming Bicycle, Pedestrian and Greenways Plan, the Mobility Greensboro Public Transportation Master Plan, and part of the titillating federal legislation regarding MPOs.
What exactly is my job, you ask? That is a wonderful question, and one I hope to answer for myself in the next 8 months or so. If I don't know what I'm doing by then, we might have to figure out another arrangement. Like driving buses. Anyway, my job title is MPO Transportation Planner. Every urbanized area of the U.S. has a Metropolitan Planning Organization, which is the conglomeration of staff and decision-makers who do the regional transportation plans. There are a lot of boring federal requirements involved, but the basic idea is that federal and state transportation dollars flow to localities through the MPOs. So part of my job is providing administrative and staff support to the decision-makers on the Greensboro Urban Area MPO's Transportation Advisory Committee... As in, I bring the coffee to the meetings, tell an intern to type up the minutes, and study whatever the decision-makers ask me to study. The MPO is not technically an arm of the city, because it is supposed to support the whole "urban area," including the city and a few small towns and unincorporated parts of the county, but the city is the lead planning agency for the MPO, meaning that its staff do the work for the MPO.
The other part of my job is working on transportation planning and implementation projects for the city. Judging from the list of files that I'm supposed to find and bring to my office/cubicle, I'll have primary responsibility for transit stuff, which is cool. Except that the city's transit administration is a separate division of GDOT and has three transportation/transit planners listed on its staff. I guess if they don't feel like performing actual transit planning, I'll work on it. And so far, I've gotten the chance to make some comments on the gigantic bike/ped/greenways plan, which is apparently one of the most ambitious in the state.
Another thing I do is go to meetings, conferences, and training. Call me young and idealistic, but I think these things are kind of fun. They're like field trips! I'm already signed up for a three-day conference in Charlotte and a two-day training in Raleigh, both of which will involve hotel stays that the City will pay for. And yesterday, I got to go to a meeting in historic Salisbury to meet other folks who work with MPOs across the state. I didn't understand a thing they were talking about, but I got to drive a City van there and eat lunch, which the City will also pay for.
So it's going well. I bike to work every day and get to explore downtown during my lunch hour. I got a free bus pass instead of paying for parking. Of course, the one time I tried to ride the bus, it was 10 minutes late and I ended up grabbing my bike instead, but I'll give it another shot sometime. Because while I'm trying to do my part to make things better here, I have to work with what we have like everyone else.
*This is true, but I'd probably have to write that anyway even if it weren't, because who knows who could stumble upon this blog?
posted by Peter @ 10:53
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