In recent years, disagreements between Durham and the North Carolina Department of Transportation have led to project delays and a feeling that the city and NCDOT are traveling on different paths. But Becca Gallas, NCDOT’s new engineer for Division 5—Durham, Wake, Granville, Franklin, Warren, Person, Vance—is ready to take the wheel and bring new, innovative ideas to the relationship.
Gallas is an MIT graduate with years of experience working in transportation both for the state of North Carolina and the private sector. She started at NCDOT as a maintenance associate where she developed a passion for “delivering solutions for transportation communities within a relatively short order.”
“If you get a call from a citizen about a pothole or a stop sign, you can make a pretty big impact,” says Gallas, who went on to work in the DOT’s aviation division. “There’s a lot of on-the-ground problem solving, which I love.”
As a sign of her bonafides in the transit equity community, Gallas claims to be the first division engineer at NCDOT who owns an E-bike. She lives in downtown Raleigh, often walking her son to preschool, and says that her love for multimodal transportation and experience working in different departments over her career gives her a unique perspective for creating effective transportation solutions.
We caught up with Gallas to learn more about her vision for NCDOT Division 5 and her approach to collaborating with Durham and other communities across central North Carolina.
INDY: How do you translate NCDOT’s mission and vision so that it can match what folks in places like Durham and Wake County are telling you they want for their own community?
GALLAS: One of the big stakeholders in this process of identifying projects and prioritizing projects are the planning organizations. In the case of Durham, it’s the newly rebranded Triangle West Transportation Planning Organization. They’re really a great interface for us and an opportunity to partner with them and the communities that they convene through their monthly meetings to create those planning documents that then get fed into NCDOT funding opportunities like our STIP (State Transportation Improvement Program), and our Spot Mobility Program, which is our safety funding program. So working through those organizations to prioritize and identify those projects and then identify the right funding mechanism—which is where the challenge can be depending on the project size, the project type, and which of our different funding pots is the best fit for that. These days, with the cost to deliver projects, it might be multiple funding sources working with municipalities as well to get some of the funding needed to actually complete a whole project.
Is there consistency across the seven counties that you’re working with? If Durham is really focused on bike paths but Franklin County is more interested in developing a better highway system for their big industrial facilities, how do you manage these very specific needs across the different communities?
Sometimes, being in Division 5 feels like there’s two divisions. We have a very urban area in Wake and Durham County that’s starting to spill up into some of the northern counties. And then we have very rural sections. If you go to Warren County or Vance County, it’s a very different community context for transportation so their needs and their vision for what transportation looks like is very different as well. We actually have three planning organizations in this area. Those have been really great resources for us.
I imagine there can be tension at times. I know that’s come up here in Durham. How do you work through those tensions to balance what NCDOT thinks is the best vision for the state, while also being responsive to community needs?
Yeah, it’s a great question, and it’s something that the city of Durham and Division 5 have identified as a need to figure out what is our collaboration model, and identify when we reach points of dissent or differing visions, how do we work through those? So we are actually in the process of launching a pilot program where we’re going to take the city of Durham’s high-injury network and identify a handful of projects, and not just focus on the solutions, but focus on the process of reaching solutions and identifying how we best work through those differences. I’m very optimistic.
Is Durham the biggest thorn in your side amongst the counties you oversee?
The city of Durham has a very clear vision for what they want their transportation network to be, and I love that. We have more passionate transportation people in Durham than many of our other areas. I mean, it can be challenging at times, but it is energizing to be surrounded by people who are passionate about their communities, who are passionate about how they move, and we as NCDOT need to be responsive to that and prepared and ready to have conversations with them, too.
What are the steps you are taking to not just meet what folks are asking for now, but get ahead and meet the needs of the future 10, 20 years from now?
Again, we’re working with our planning organizations like Triangle West and North Carolina Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (CAMPO). Right now, they’re going through the process for their 2055 metropolitan planning document to vision that future. Through that, we’re collaborating with them on some of those different scenarios. There are a lot of exciting and transformative potential projects on the horizon, like mobility hubs and bus rapid transit, and as we start to deliver projects, we are looking to be good partners in that as well.
What are those big projects that NCDOT is considering for communities that are affected by climate change, but also, just in general, for communities like Durham that want to see those types of projects in their community?
Resiliency is a big priority for the department right now, particularly when building back from Hurricane Helene. I actually just got back yesterday from a trip to Asheville where we were talking about that very thing. That is something that we’re starting to build in is looking at those future technologies, which I’m very passionate about coming from my time at Division of Aviation. After natural disasters like Helene, drones were a big part of our response. We surveyed over 300 drone missions, capturing more pictures than we’ve ever taken of any event previously. We saw drone deliveries of medication and things like that during Hurricane Helene. So as we start to get through some of the drone regulatory hoops, that’ll be a big piece. And the division of aviation also just launched an advanced Air Mobility planning grant, so working with communities to give them resources to start to plan for things like drones, and one day, things like air taxis, which is another new aviation technology. Overall, the department, through places like division of aviation, integrated mobility division, and some of our future technology groups, are looking at, how do we pilot these new technologies in different communities to see what sort of needs they address well? And then, how do we continue to deploy them in ways that push the bounds of innovation here in North Carolina.
Do you think funding will continue to be available for big, bold projects? One of the things that comes up constantly in Durham is the failed light rail project. Folks are still salty about that, and some are still clamoring for bigger regional transportation opportunities, whether it be commuter rail or [bus rapid transit]. Recently there’s sort of a lot of swings between federal administrations in terms of transportation funding, particularly around green projects and these more innovative transportation projects.
Innovative projects usually have many different types of funding, so federal funding is a piece of it, but certainly it’s not the whole piece. Generally, we’ve received a lot of support from the legislature for things like drone activities. In particular, they’ve always done a great job of valuing that, in part, because we’ve shown the return on investment. Some of those technologies present the opportunity for new industries to grow in North Carolina and to foster future jobs for North Carolinians. And so I think part of continuing innovation is continuing to show the potential that it has for economic development.
I’ll say my strategy towards innovation, because I’m very pro innovation, is if the funding isn’t here now, it’s still a good idea, and we need to find that funding. That’s something I know we’re doing if we don’t have funding today is we inventory it and create a business case for when that discretionary grant opportunity comes up or that next funding opportunity is available. We’re constantly scanning for those opportunities.
Durham city council just received its Vision Zero Action Plan, and one of the specific goals was doing a better job of data tracking, particularly on the city’s high injury network. What are the metrics that NCDOT would be looking at that would make it more viable from the department’s perspective to implement some of those bigger improvements like converting one-way streets to two-way?
Our core is always the crash data—number of crashes, severity of crashes, whether it be a severe injury, minor injury, fatalities—that’s the core data set. But the other thing that’s really important, Justin, is also looking at the context. Just looking at traffic data is only half the picture. I was actually out on Gregson Street last month with council member Carl Rist and some of the community members, and we walked the corridor to look at things like lane widths and visual obstructions. Sometimes, there’s sight line issues that also help inform some of the solutions as well. So crash data is half the story and the other half is actually the context and what are some of those factors influencing crashes?
If there’s something there that is very easy to fund a solution for, we’ll address it. If it’s some of these bigger solutions, like looking at the one-way pairs, then that may take more time, but certainly something that we’re continuing to prioritize. That’s something that we’re going to start to do more now that Triangle West and the city of Durham have both rolled out their high injury networks. I’ve already talked to the city of Durham about getting myself and our staff out to do some of these walking audits so we actually have the opportunity to walk the corridor with city staff, to talk about that shared vision for several of these high injury network corridors, and to talk about what are some viable solutions that address NCDOT concerns and the city’s concerns. And I think the best way to do that is to be there walking that network with those partners.
This interview has been edited for length.
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