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As a child, Eric Ploski ’99, MCP ’00 rode the New York subway with his grandmother to all the city attractions on the map. “When they ask me how I got into the transport, I always ask them:“ How did you get out of it? “He says. “Every little child seems to love trains, subways, buses, cars and planes, and for some reason they ‘grew out of it.’ I never did. “

Now head of transportation planning at the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center in Kendall Square, Ploski and his team have worked their imaginations to reimagine what transportation can be. “It’s not just steel and concrete. These are people, this is the decision-making process, this is history and culture, ”he says.

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At MIT, Ploski earned two degrees from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning; he also attended liberal arts courses and wrote for The Tech magazine. An internship at the Wolpe Center developed into a 20-year career.

Although Volpe is part of the US Department of Transportation, it is fully funded through direct consulting projects with other agencies and private organizations looking for unconventional solutions to complex problems. His team’s recent projects have included autonomous vehicle systems at Yellowstone National Park and Wright Brothers National Memorial; analysis of the national agricultural freight highway network; and a series of efforts funded by the Millennium Challenge Corporation to rationalize complex urban transport systems in places such as Kenya and Sri Lanka. “When someone talks about some strange and distant transportation project that no one knows anything about, we get involved,” says Plosky.

After Hurricane Katrina Ploski spent several months in Louisiana working with affected communities. The resulting guidance documents he wrote have since become part of the National Disaster Recovery Program, which has helped guide COVID-19 recovery efforts. “If you just return everything to the way it was before, this is just a restoration; true recovery requires something different, ”he says.

After work, Ploski teaches a course on sustainable transportation at the Harvard School of Continuing Education, serves as a Lemelson-MIT Student Award Judge and mentor for freshmen at MIT Terrascope. He also writes, publishing a daily story series on Infrequent.com.

Plosky says he is encouraged by the growing federal action on infrastructure issues that exacerbate racial inequality and climate change. He says: “I really hope that we can create a transportation system that meets the needs of today and tomorrow, and not just the anticipated needs of yesterday.”