Scott Stanford:

What's up everybody? Welcome to The Infrastructors. It's the premier podcast for engaging conversations with influential thought leaders in AI, tech, government policy, and smart city innovation. Today's guest is a special one. She's the Director of Connected and Automated Services at Gannett Fleming, Laurie Matkowski.

Laurie, thank you so much for hanging out here on The Infrastructors. So nice to see you.

Laurie Matkowski:

Nice to see you.

Scott Stanford:

I read in your bio that one of the first jobs that you had, and correct me if I'm wrong, you were a traffic engineer, right?

Laurie Matkowski:

Yes.

Scott Stanford:

So how does someone in college get interested in becoming a traffic engineer?

Laurie Matkowski:

That's a good question. So I'm a civil engineer by background, and when I was in college, they were talking about all this new technology for transportation. Transportation is my sector. Talking about traffic flow theory and how that intersects with technology and different traffic signal systems that could be implemented, I thought that was really interesting. So an alumnus from my school, I went to Clemson University, reached out and said, "Hey, we do traffic engineering. Is this something you're interested in?" I said, "Of course it is. Yes."

Scott Stanford:

I love it. Is there something that you could look back to that kicked you into the interest in this? Was it something before college, as a kid in high school, were you already interested in this type of industry?

Laurie Matkowski:

Yes. Ever since I was a kid.

Scott Stanford:

Since you were a kid?

Laurie Matkowski:

Yes, totally. So my brothers, they would be in the sandbox, and they'd have their cars and everything, and I would make the roadways in the sandbox, so it started off there. And I always just was interested in transportation and how people get to where they need to go and how that works, and just a holistic view of transportation from a very early age, so that always stuck with me about just how people get to where they need to be going.

Scott Stanford:

At Gannett Fleming, you are the Director of Connected Automated Vehicles, CAVs from here on in. Connected automated vehicles. To me, sounds like you are the person in charge of getting us to Jetson-like status, where we're talking about cars that talk to each other, cars that are going to be hovering above the road pretty soon. Tell me, what's your job there at the company?

Laurie Matkowski:

I wear a lot of different hats at the company. That is a title that I have that I work on those services. So any contracts that we have that deal with CAV comes through my group and myself, and I manage people that work on the contracts. We do a lot of strategic planning in that space. So federal contracts, state contracts, some local, and looking at policy and strategy.

Scott Stanford:

When you're talking about connected automated vehicles, what are the specifics on that? I mean, when I'm driving on the road, AI somewhere in my car is going to be talking to the car next to me so we don't interfere with each other? Will it avoid, I assume, a lot of accidents in the future?

Laurie Matkowski:

Do we need a CAV lesson here? 101?

Scott Stanford:

Talk to me like I'm an 11 year old.

Laurie Matkowski:

Well, I don't know, 11 year olds know a lot right now. I have two daughters, almost 13 and 16, and a couple years ago I said to my youngest daughter, who was maybe 10 or 11 at the time, I said, "What do you think of this connected vehicle? What do you think that means?" And she said, "Well, the cars will just talk to each other. No matter what they're doing, they'll know where they are. Each of them will know where they are." So what if a car drops you off somewhere and-

Scott Stanford:

So you're in the back and there's no driver?

Laurie Matkowski:

You're in back, there's no driver, car drops you off. And she said, "Well, the car will just know where to go, know where to park or know where to find the other person." So she gets it. She understands. But in a safety sense, which is the biggest benefit of these connected vehicle systems, is that they will know where each other is from a basic point of view. I wish that everybody had this connected vehicle technology, because when I'm going down the roadway, my car is equipped with sensors to know if I'm in the lane. Same with you.

Scott Stanford:

Right. Those are fantastic.

Laurie Matkowski:

So that's connected vehicle technology and well, it's kind of automated technology too, but if it's communicating with the vehicle next to you and they have the same sensors, then you're going to be able to have a buffer to know how far you are, and your car's going to keep you in that lane. So there's a lot of safety measures. That's the biggest benefit of these CAVs, actually.

Scott Stanford:

I'm still at the point where if I play with it, if I'm on cruise control and I have the driver directed assistance, I'll still sit there like this with my hands here, just in case.

Laurie Matkowski:

Of course, it's a trust issue. You and I aren't used to that, but the new drivers, even my 16 year old, she just turned 16, she doesn't even want to drive. She doesn't even want to get a license because people take her around to where, people meaning me, take her around to where she needs it.

Scott Stanford:

Right, you're the Uber driver.

Laurie Matkowski:

But she also sees a way that it can be Uber, it can be anyone else. It can be transit. There are many options to get to where she needs to be.

Scott Stanford:

Again, I know you had mentioned it in several meetings you have had and public speaking engagements, it's almost like the Disney animated film Cars, where they literally have the mouths talking to each other. But you know what, it's the old life imitating art. We're really not that far off from where we need to be, but we are kind of far off because to me, it'll take a lot more testing and planning for me to get into a car in the back where there's no driver. That's going to take a little while for me to trust that process. How far away do you think we are from something like that?

Laurie Matkowski:

From fully automated vehicles? Driverless?

Scott Stanford:

Yeah.

Laurie Matkowski:

I don't know if we'll ever get to that.

Scott Stanford:

I mean, technology moves so fast, tomorrow is twice as far as where we are today, but it just seems like, again, it's that trust issue. I know when I'm driving and my wife's sitting next to me, if a brake light goes on 100 yards ahead, she gives me a heart attack. So I could see that trust issue.

Laurie Matkowski:

But if your vehicle is going to go ahead and brake for you, it is a trust issue. You have got to trust that it's going to do that. But, I mean, that's the idea, that they're communicating with each other to know. Just like your cruise control, it slows you down when you get too close.

Scott Stanford:

Right, when you get close. Yeah, no, I mean, we have come so far with that.

Laurie Matkowski:

And then you can also take it a step further to your traffic management centers. If they are monitoring, let's say, a section of roadway that they see all these vehicles, like 100 vehicles or so, putting on their windshield wipers, they don't need to know that it's raining, they'll know that there's a lot of windshield wipers going, it must be rain there, so I'm going to slow down the traffic. The traffic management center is getting that information. Automatically put speed enforcement or maybe, one day, slow down the cars, actually have the ability to slow down the cars. That's another safety example.

Scott Stanford:

I heard you tell a story that you were proud of. One of your first official projects was this virtual traffic safety project with Philadelphia, New Jersey, and it turned out to where the Pope was coming to town, and you guys used what you had already done to make sure the traffic patterns were clear for the Pope. Tell me a little bit about that.

Laurie Matkowski:

Sort of. Something like that.

Scott Stanford:

Go ahead.

Laurie Matkowski:

When I was in public sector, I worked for a regional metropolitan planning organization out of Philadelphia. We wrote a traffic management center concept of operations years before the Pope came.

Scott Stanford:

Which Pope are we talking? Do you remember? It had to be Pope John, Pope Benedict, one of those.

Laurie Matkowski:

It was like 10 years ago. I don't know.

Scott Stanford:

Google us who the Pope was 10 years ago, please.

Laurie Matkowski:

What was happening at the time of the planning was that the Pope was only going to be in Philadelphia. There were no other public appearances. What happened after that is he went to DC and then New York, so the amount of traffic that we were expecting was much less because there are now three location versus one. But the city of Philadelphia did not have a formal traffic management center. But through the planning of the Pope coming, they said, "You have a concept of operations already written, so now let's put that in place." It accelerated the process. So it was actually in place.

Scott Stanford:

A plan in place. Wow.

Laurie Matkowski:

But that brings up the concept of planning in advance. So, you must have this planning vision. We need a traffic management center. We don't have the means, we don't have the funding yet for it, but then something came in that we weren't expecting, and it accelerated the process. So it's really important to plan, even for technology.

Scott Stanford:

What's amazing to me about your job, is you have to be able to see things so differently than someone like me, who drives through a community and I don't really pay attention to many things. You could go through a community and say, "What times does everybody leave to go to work? How do they get there?" Train, scooter, bus, whatever it is. And you guys could go in and plan around that, which to me, it's just an amazing view of things.

Laurie Matkowski:

And also you don't care who owns what road of what part, and that's huge, because you could be going on a state road, a county road, and a local road, and you just want to get to where you're going, but there are all sorts of implications to that. Who owns and maintains which part of the road? And we have to think from a bigger perspective of, the commuter does not care who owns what road, but you need to have a reliability to get to where you're going. So there's a lot of moving parts in that.

Scott Stanford:

Yeah, no, it's amazing. It really is. Because like I said, I've heard you talk in other places and it's just the way you guys view things, it's totally out of the box from a normal person. And the industry you're in, I have to assume is, because I've heard you mention where you would love to see more female minds coming in, a mostly male dominated business, which it's not the worst thing in the world, but you'd like to see the female minds coming in. But how do you recruit? How do you get more females like you? Growing up, this is something you knew you wanted to do. If I ran into 10 females on the street, young girls, this probably wouldn't be even in any of the 10 that I'd ask. So how do you recruit? How do you get young females interested in something like transportation safety, transportation planning?

Laurie Matkowski:

That's a great question and not an easy one to answer.

Scott Stanford:

No, I could imagine.

Laurie Matkowski:

And I would say it's not just females, but people of diverse backgrounds, really.

Scott Stanford:

Right, diversity.

Laurie Matkowski:

But females, yes, because we're not necessarily exposed to exactly what I'm doing. And you kind of fall into this over the years and with different projects and it's not so straightforward. So what I do, and what I think is a big component of recruiting, is exposure. So I go into schools, I'm all over the country with different universities, and just even K-12, but University of Memphis has a school that they work with, I think it's a high school, that I've gone and spoken to before, and they look at STEM, which is-

Scott Stanford:

STEM, oh yeah.

Laurie Matkowski:

Now it's STEAM, adding the arts to it too, which I do have an arts background, interestingly enough, that kind of folds into this. I do speak at Philadelphia public schools and just give exposure. And one of the first things I say to them when I go into the room, I don't say I'm an engineer, I just say, "How did everybody get here today?" And they say they walked there, they took the train, or they whatever. I say, "That's transportation. Everybody's affected by transportation."

And then they start to see, their minds start to say, "Oh, well, I'm part of this community." I say, "Yeah, so you can have influence on this community. You can be part of this community. It is for you." It's not just engineering for men that traditionally they think. And I've had great mentors. I have mentees that I have kind of brought up through this industry that are now influencing other people. So it's almost a one at a time. But through podcasts like this, then it can be inspiring perhaps to other women.

Scott Stanford:

Do you have right now, we're talking about the connected automated vehicles, is there something you guys are looking into right now for the future that could drastically affect in a positive way and bring everything further along than where we are now? Are there things happening right now that we don't even know about, that maybe in a year from now is going to change the whole game for you guys? Or you haven't seen anything yet? It's just a slow process?

Laurie Matkowski:

I'm going to answer this question in a way that you're probably not expecting.

Scott Stanford:

Go ahead.

Laurie Matkowski:

Institutional coordination.

Scott Stanford:

Meaning what?

Laurie Matkowski:

Meaning that right now, not everybody's on the same page from a policy strategy level.

Scott Stanford:

Which is very hard to do in any business, is to get everybody on the same page.

Laurie Matkowski:

It could be the public getting onto the page of trusting these CAVs, or institutionally for organizations. Getting just an organization itself to buy-in to this process. So you have our current infrastructure right now throughout the country, because I'm on some federal projects that are looking at this, they are not necessarily in a state of good repair, so that's what we have to do first, is bring up our roadways to a state of good repair, and then you can layer on all these CAV elements that are needed for the vehicles that are coming in.

So it takes buy-in, it takes strategy, it takes policy. We're getting there, and I'm working on some federal projects that are looking at that framework and laying out the framework for how it should be. I would say that coordination is key. Technology is important, yes, it's really there already, but it's getting the buy-in, getting everybody on the same page, and that, I think, is the biggest challenge.

Scott Stanford:

Yeah, no, I can imagine, like we said, you can't get everybody on the same page to say that the sun is yellow on a certain day. You talk a lot about, and in my previous experience with these type of interviews, everybody always talks about smart cities. The layperson knows our smartphones, our smart TVs, but when it comes to a smart city, and when I say city, that could be one town, one community, a large city, what does a completely integrated smart city look like? And is there even one today that's fully a smart city?

Laurie Matkowski:

There are a lot of smart cities out there. I'll bring up the US DOT designated smart city of Smart Columbus, which I actually worked for on behalf of US DOT to do an evaluation. And that is bringing a lot of different data points together to view the city holistically. So it's looking at your water, your power, your transportation network. Where are people moving? So let's say you wake up in the morning and a lot of people are working from home, but they may have to go out, let's say, you go out to Starbucks. So a lot of people are going out to Starbucks first thing in the morning, so you-

Scott Stanford:

I'm more of a Dunkin Donuts guy myself.

Laurie Matkowski:

That is good. I do like their matcha lattes better than Starbucks.

Scott Stanford:

And they're a big sponsor of this program. No, I'm kidding. But no, I'm kidding.

Laurie Matkowski:

But yeah, you start to see travel patterns in the morning where people are going to get their coffee, their chosen place of coffee, and maybe they go back to their house, maybe they go to the office. So if you can look at transportation as how it's moving, then you can see where power is being-

Scott Stanford:

It's all being utilized and where it's going.

Laurie Matkowski:

Yeah, where it's being utilized, and then where water is being utilized. It used to be very much more clear, where people would leave the residential area, go to the commercial area, and then go to different places, and then you could see the rise of power and water and transportation very clearly. Now it's a little bit more blurred because of the pandemic and people's different travel patterns.

But once you marry all of those different sectors of a city, that becomes a smart city, then you can figure out where your utilization of different utilities are and start to put more smartness into it. And that's not very smart to say that, but you can understand what I mean.

Scott Stanford:

Smartness, you're really just talking about current technology today.

Laurie Matkowski:

Just pulling it all together. So there's a lot of silos between different utility companies, they just do what they need to do, and it's not necessarily married together. But that's what we need to do, look at a city, community, whatever it is, as a system, your transit, your everything, works together. How everything works together to make the most efficient use.

Scott Stanford:

Can you tell our Infrastructors audience how Gannett Fleming and some other companies, like Rekor and Centra are teaming up to address the revenue impact of electric cars, which we're seeing every company have them now, and with the Teslas on the road and the Chevrolet. If we were to go to electric cars fully right now, how much of an impact would that have on just our earth?

Laurie Matkowski:

Well, you asked me a lot of different things in that question.

Scott Stanford:

Start with the first one. Start with Gannett Fleming and how guys are teaming up with other companies like Rekor and Centra.

Laurie Matkowski:

Yeah, we partner with a lot of different companies. Rekor is an important partner in artificial intelligence and really recognizing what the current conditions are out there.

Although we do traditional engineering, we do more planning and advanced mobility. It all works together. Looking at partnering with a company like Centra, which is a private partnership type company that brings in private funding, you think about the bigger picture of how a Department of Transportation works and how they're going to be needing some private funding in to look at different ways of funding transportation. So that's how those types of partnerships can work of different specialties together.

Being a traditional engineering company and looking at how systems should be working, one of my charges is to write up concept of operations for how the bigger picture of a project would work. You bring in all these different specialties, you look outside the box. One company I don't think can do everything in this day and age, you need the private funding companies, you need AI, you need traditional engineering, you need construction services, you need different services to come together. I think more and more project teams are realizing the strengths that others can bring, and there's enough work out there for everybody, so let's do it.

Scott Stanford:

Oh, it's amazing.

Laurie Matkowski:

And then you were talking about the electric vehicles, and the impact on that.

Scott Stanford:

There's still obviously more gas vehicles than electric. And of course we've spoken right here on this particular podcast about, again, the smart cities, where those electric charging stations need to be. Do you see a world in the not too distant future where companies are... Even dominoes, has electric cars now for their deliveries. Do you see a world where it's just electric in the near future, or is that very far off?

Laurie Matkowski:

I think more and more. So there's a lot of different factors in there. There's the, can everybody buy an electric vehicle?

Scott Stanford:

Right. Well, you figure the more that are out, the less eventually they'll cost.

Laurie Matkowski:

Right. What are the policies? Are there policies for government agencies to only use electric vehicles in their fleets? And if so, how can they get them? I had a project about a year ago, we were talking to fleet managers and the conversion to electric vehicles. Because of the pandemic, they actually couldn't get their electric vehicles that they had ordered a year prior, so there's a supply chain issue that's still being affected now. So although the policy may say all your fleets need to be electric, it's just not there yet. The supply is not there yet. So there's a little bit of a disconnect.

So would I say in five years everything should be electric? Maybe. But is the supply there even? Are you able to afford it? California has different rules and laws and policies than New Jersey does. I don't know if I gave you a clear answer on that.

Scott Stanford:

It was clear enough for my small brain, sure.

Laurie Matkowski:

But then thinking about the gas tax and road usage charge, and if an electric vehicle is using the roadway the same as a gas driven vehicle, but you're using the roadway the same and it's being disintegrated, if you will, that's a harsh term, but it's being disintegrated the same way, who pays for that?

Scott Stanford:

Right. Well, I think, listen, if everybody had an electric vehicle, everybody needs to have an electric charging station in their home or on their driveway, because to go sit at a gas station, which is now an electric charging station, you need some time. Takes some time.

Before we go, I know you always love to reference a poem from the 1970s about a traffic light that you used to tell your daughters. Who was the author?

Laurie Matkowski:

Shel Silverstein.

Scott Stanford:

Shel Silverstein. Thinking about that poem, and I'll let you tell the audience. I won't make you recite it word for word.

Laurie Matkowski:

I know, I forgot to look it up on my phone.

Scott Stanford:

That poem, talking about a light that never turns green and everybody's just sitting there patiently waiting, reflecting on where we are today. Tell me about that. Why did you love to read that to your kids?

Laurie Matkowski:

Well, I love to read anything to my kids, but specifically that because it ties in my traffic engineering background, and so I love that. But to bring that sort of angle to any audience, first of all, it's different when you come to a conference and you see somebody doing a poetry reading, that's a little bit different. So it catches them a little bit differently than they would've just some basic presentation, which I do those too, it's all valid, but to do a poetry reading, it starts people thinking in a different way.

So back in the 70s, there's still traffic lights, and you're sitting there, and then it's the bigger picture of people just waiting for technology to come and waiting for change to happen. But we don't need to wait, we can do it right now.

Scott Stanford:

It's here.

Laurie Matkowski:

We can have those conversations right now. Technology is there, it's the getting people on the same page, talking about policy and strategy, building frameworks for digital infrastructure, physical infrastructure. We know the technology's coming in, we just have to get on the same page with thinking how that's going to be executed.

Scott Stanford:

We were talking about young girls and the directions they want to go. Do you try to steer your girls in your direction, into this industry? Do they ask you questions?

Laurie Matkowski:

They think that I have the worst job. They think I have the most boring job. They have no idea. And actually their friends say, "Your mom, she does some cool stuff," and they're like, "Ugh," with the eye rolling and everything. They love math, they're great in it. But my younger daughter is into rock climbing and she's does TV broadcasts in her school. She loves that. And my older daughter is a ballerina. She's taking calculus in 10th grade. So they have everything. I said, "Girls, you could be an engineer too. It's not a bad gig."

Scott Stanford:

I know you had said at one point when you used to go into a party and tell people you are a traffic engineer, you said, you were the life of the party, right?

Laurie Matkowski:

Everybody has traffic issues. They say, "I'm sitting at this light," kind of like that poem, "I'm sitting at this light waiting for the traffic light to change." And I say, "Well, there's many factors involved in that."

Scott Stanford:

I love it. I love it. Laurie Matkowski, Gannett Fleming. Was it painless?

Laurie Matkowski:

I mean, pretty much.

Scott Stanford:

Thank you so much.

Laurie Matkowski:

Yes, you're welcome. Thank you for the opportunity.