WSP USA Honors Donald Emerson with Lifetime Achievement Award

When Donald Emerson began his transportation career in 1969 with the Bureau of Public Roads, construction of the Interstate Highway System was in full swing, Detroit automakers were competing to build the fastest muscle cars, and gasoline cost about 35 cents a gallon.

Emerson, a WSP USA Advisory senior vice president for transportation planning and project development and the 2021 recipient of the firm’s Lifetime Achievement Award, recalled his early years in government service with great fondness.

“It was like being a kid in a candy store, working on interesting and important transit projects that all had unique issues and challenges,” he said.

By 1981, Emerson had transitioned from the Bureau of Public Roads – now known as the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) – to the Urban Mass Transportation Administration (UMTA). As a staffer in and later chief of the Analysis Division, he championed rigorous public transit planning and helped shape Federal policies and criteria for major transit investments. He had a hand in light rail projects from San Diego to Boston.

After Congress passed the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act in 1991, renaming UMTA as the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), Emerson led the long and complex process of integrating federal highway and transit planning process requirements. For this, he won Vice President Al Gore’s Hammer Award for efficiency and innovation in 1994. Concurrently, he led the FTA group that managed New Starts planning and oversaw National Environmental Policy Act implementation.

But in 1996, Emerson was ready for a career change and accepted a post with Parsons Brinckerhoff (now WSP).

Since then, Emerson and his Advisory teams have worked collaboratively with WSP planners and engineers, helping dozens of transit agency clients to plan and develop projects worthy of receiving FTA Capital Investment Grants.

In 2020 and 2021 alone, Don contributed to transit programs that were rewarded with $3.3 billion in FTA Capital Investment Grants.

In addition to the value he provides on projects to WSP clients, Emerson enthusiastically mentors colleagues within WSP with insights on the transit industry and advice on resolving complex project challenges.

According to Emerson, mentoring and coaching are major components to WSP’s consulting work for transit agency clients. He has been active in WSP’s Technical Leadership Program, led several “New Starts 101” internal training programs, and helped develop and deliver FTA’s training on Alternatives Analysis.

“We know the process of successful transit planning and program development as well as or better than anybody,” Emerson said. “But we also seek to empower our clients to build their internal capacity.”

One example: When Emerson and his team began working with Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) in 2014, the agency had not applied for an FTA Capital Investment Grant in many years.

“They had little institutional memory about the Capital Investment Grant (CIG) process because of staff turnover,” Emerson said. Plus, the CIG process had changed over time, creating a new opportunity for Core Capacity projects. “We started coaching BART on the basics of CIG and advising them through each step in the process. By the time they received a $1.2 Core Capacity Grant in 2020, they knew the process as well as I did.”

His contributions to dozens of signature transportation projects coast-to-coast have been significant. His advice and expertise have helped transit clients secure grants and loans for major projects in Los Angeles, San Diego, Washington D.C., Denver, Chicago, Minneapolis, Kansas City and Utah, among others.

Emerson has also been active in the American Public Transportation Association. In the late 1990s, he chaired its Major Capital Investment Planning Subcommittee, and then was elevated to chair the Policy and Planning Committee for two years. He remains active on the Steering Committee of APTA’s Policy, Planning and Program Development Committee. Whenever the committees consider issues related to the Capital Investment Grant program, Emerson is an influential contributor. 

Research and training have also been part of Emerson’s career. The Transportation Research Board has published his papers and reports, including NCHRP Report 827 (Navigating Multi-Agency NEPA Processes to Advance Multimodal Transportation Projects) in 2016. He developed and presented training courses for the National Transit Institute and the National Highway Institute.

At the local level, Emerson chaired the Fairfax County (VA) Transportation Advisory Commission for six years in the 1990s. Concurrently, he chaired the citizens advisory committee for a Virginia DOT study of Occoquan River crossing alternatives, for which received a Citizen of the Year award.

Emerson’s interest in transit and transportation planning emerged when he was boy.

“Growing up in the Boston area, we spent our summers in Orleans on Cape Cod,” he said. “There was a large sandy area that became my play spot. Using pieces of scrap wood, I’d build cities, roads and interchanges. That was my first palette for urban planning.”

His father’s passion for trains made a strong impression, too.

“When we drove back and forth between the Cape and the Boston area, Dad knew the train schedules ahead of time,” Emerson recalled fondly. “We’d stop at grade crossings when he knew a train was coming, and he’d get out and photograph them. My mother said the first words I ever spoke were, ‘Here comes the train!’” During his college years, Emerson spent summers driving a kiddy train at a small amusement park on Cape Cod.

When Emerson graduated in civil engineering from Tufts University, a professor who’d taken an interest in him suggested he apply to the Bureau of Public Roads.

“They hired me into their training program,” he said. For three years, he and other trainees learned “everything related to highways and the federal highway program.”

He spent almost a year in Atlanta, then nine months in Tucson working on an Interstate highway construction project. After a posting in Boston, he accepted a permanent assignment in Washington, D.C. working in a new environmental policy office for the re-named FHWA.

“NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) had recently passed,” Emerson said. “So FHWA created an environmental office to comply with that and other environmental laws.”

After obtaining his master’s degree in urban affairs from Virginia Tech and taking on progressively more responsibility in environmental planning at FHWA in Denver and again in Washington, he made the transition to FTA in 1981.

“It was a great opportunity to work with transit agencies analyzing alternatives for light rail and bus rapid transit,” he said. “The fact that this was a discretionary program excited me. We developed rules, procedures and criteria for project funding. While these have evolved over the years, much of the groundwork laid in the 1980s and 1990s can be seen the program today.

While at the FTA, Emerson also played a key role in developing New Starts policies and procedures. He helped write early policy statements that defined the New Starts process and created the first project evaluation and rating system. He also co-authored FTA’s Procedural and Technical Methods for Transit Project Planning manual that served as the principal guide for transit alternatives analysis planning.

As a passionate advocate for transit, Emerson has experienced the substantial growth in transit funding and ridership. Transit ridership has suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the uncertainties thus created have created exciting new challenges for planners.

“I am also encouraged by some of the proposals Congress is considering, such as increased transit funding in the bipartisan infrastructure bill,” he said.

As colleagues and friends learned of his Lifetime Achievement Award, Emerson said many asked if this meant he was retiring. “I still like what I’m doing, and value the relationships I have with others in the industry,” he said, noting that he has reduced his schedule to part time, which allows him to spend more time with his wife of 13 years, Harriett.  He said his most important "lifetime achievements"  are his two sons, Jonathan (a software engineer in San Francisco) and Matthew (an architect in Vancouver, British Columbia) plus four grandchildren, Eliot, David, Isla and Rye.

“It has been an exciting 50 years working on great projects with great people,” Emerson added. “One of my favorite things to do is ride on projects that I had a hand in. It’s a real thrill to know the history, the arduous work it took to plan, design and fund a system and the complex transit projects I’ve had the good fortune to influence.”

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