[Themaintainers] Introductions: Carole Voulgaris, MIII Transportatation track

[Carole Turley Voulgaris]

Hi Everyone,

I'm Carole Voulgaris, another one of the co-chairs on the transportation
track for the MIII conference. I'm currently an assistant professor in the
civil engineering department at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where I teach
classes in transportation engineering, including public transportation,
transportation system planning, intelligent transportation systems, and
sustainable mobility. My undergraduate and master's degrees are in civil
engineering, but my doctorate is in urban planning, and I consider
transportation planning and policy to be my disciplinary home.

I first heard about the Maintainers when Lee presented some of his work at
the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting. I got excited about the
idea of a interdisciplinary group of interested people working on the topic
of maintenance, so I reached out to see if I could get involved and jumped
at the opportunity to co-chair the MIII transportation track.

The questions about maintenance that I am most interested in are related to
how we pay for the maintenance of our transportation systems. People
(voters and the traveling public) are accustomed to the idea that urban
travel should be free or nearly free, but also demand a level of quality is
not possible at the prices they are willing to pay (through taxes, fares,
tolls, or other user fees). No one is against filling potholes per se, but
no one wants to be the one to pay for it. Particularly in my current role
as a transportation engineering professor, I often hear people say,
"Engineers need to figure out a way to fix these problems with our
transportation system." And my response is always, "That is not a difficult
engineering problem. We know how to fix it. What we don't know is how to
fund it."

I imagine that these questions are also pertinent to the maintenance of
other systems, like information and software. Maintenance is great, how do
we pay for it, and who should pay for it? What most excites me about MIII
is the chance we'll have to draw connections between how all these
different disciplines approach really similar problems.

Looking forward to seeing many of you at MIII, and I hope to see proposals
for sessions, papers, workshops, etc in the coming weeks! As a reminder of
the types of submissions we're looking for:
http://themaintainers.org/miii-submit-proposal

*______________________________*
*Carole Turley Voulgaris*
Doctoral alumna
UCLA Department of Urban Planning
425.502.0019
caroleturley at ucla.edu
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