A Message from Robert Puentes
Eno’s President and CEO
We like to refer to our organization as the world’s oldest start-up. Although we are approaching our centenary in 2021, the Eno Center for Transportation doesn’t act like a 100-year old think tank. The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly affected how we are accomplishing work at Eno. But our mission to shape public debate on critical multimodal transportation issues and build an innovative network of transportation professionals has not changed. In fact, the current reality brings into sharp focus why the work we do is fundamental to our nation’s transportation system, its people, and the economy.
We know that transportation professionals are looking to each other for creative problem solving, now more than ever before. Today, there is an insatiable demand for people to learn from one another, especially in transportation. That’s why we are piloting a new Intra-Regional Multi-Agency Exchange (MetroMAX) program to bring together employees with similar roles at different agencies within the same region to engage with and build relationships through curated meetings, tours, and information sharing.
This year, we will utilize new tools to allow transportation professionals, experts, and leaders to interact in new ways. Eno will launch our new Learning Management System (LMS) to significantly build our outreach and webinars with an online platform. It will allow us to vastly expand our audience by enabling participants to access our classes, forums, and training on-demand and virtually. LMS is the future of learning and Eno is embracing it, not as a replacement, but as a complement to our work.
While our work remains focused domestically, we are also increasingly looking outside the United States for best practices, ideas, and experiences. In an increasingly global environment, we are finding lots of receptivity to international lessons. That’s why we recently brought a delegation of U.S. officials overseas to hear about other cities’ experiences with congestion pricing policies and directly inform the new wave of policy and practice innovation here at home. We also intend to dig deep into several international cases to understand how American cities, states, and metropolitan areas can deliver public transit projects better, faster, and cheaper.
The workplace environment for startups is also characterized as valuing open communication and collective problem-solving. Even during this turbulent time, the Eno team embodies this culture and works together to learn from each other, help the organization remain strong, and look around the corner for the next innovation in transportation policy and practice.
To read the rest of Eno’s 2019 Impact Report, click here.