Professor of practice Leslie Richards on innovative transit and city planning
2 min. read
Once described as a “battleship turner” by Philadelphia Magazine, Weitzman professor of practice Leslie Richards served as secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) and subsequently led the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA), where she oversaw a $2 billion budget and a network that connects over five million residents in Greater Philadelphia. Having earned a master of regional planning degree from Penn in 1993, she was the first planner and first woman to lead PennDOT. She returned to Penn in 2020, and teaches in the Department of City & Regional Planning at the Weitzman School of Design.
Leslie Richards, professor of practice in the Weitzman School.
“I teach The Practice of Transportation Planning: Crafting Policies & Building Infrastructure. We look at policy and funding from the federal, state, local level: Why some projects get done, why some projects don’t get done, who are all the stakeholders—who are the decision makers?,” Richards says.
“I’m always highlighting the importance of communication—that no matter what you know, unless you can effectively convey it to others, it’s not going to help. I think it’s really important for them to know that any person in that class, just like I was in that class three decades ago, can run a large agency—and trust me, that’s not what I saw myself doing 30 years ago! If you figure out what you’re passionate about and figure out what it is that you want to do, the sky is really the limit,” she says. “One thing I think planners are so good at is asking ‘Why?’—‘Why are we building? And who are the people who are going to benefit? What are the opportunities people are going to have once this project is done?’ At community meetings, it’s easy to get lost in things like, ‘What materials are you using?’ and ‘How quickly can you get it done?’”
Richards earned a reputation for bringing positive change to transit and transportation. “I found at PennDOT, as well as at SEPTA, our employees had great ideas. I’m very proud that at SEPTA, we now have a transformation office. They receive ideas from our employees at all levels, and they look into them to see: Where can we save money? Where can we save time? Where can we do things better? Already they have saved tens of millions of dollars every year on those things. We have such limited resources in these large agencies—limited funding, limited workforce, limited tools—that it’s the only way we’re going to advance.”
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