I know that some green transportation activists have suggested that Rita Robinson isn’t an alternative transportation visionary (like Janette Sadik-Khan in NYC, or even Gail Goldberg in the LA City Planning Department). Personally, though, I think, so far, she’s been a little deferential to the car-centric culture at LADOT… but in the past she has shown that she can make good progress at changing departmental culture.

Here’s a story about Robinson’s leadership at the Bureau of Sanitation. BOS had a record of being very litigious to avoid city responsibility for meeting clean water standards. While the BOS upper management appeared pretty set in its reluctance to embrace environmental standards, Rita Robinson, who is not a sanitation engineer, was able to reach down into the middle management and promote a more forward-thinking younger Latino engineer (Enrique Zaldivar – who, in my opinion, isn’t the second coming of Rachel Carson or anything… but good.) I think this change took leadership on Robinson’s part, and from Mayor Villaraigosa (and others, including Cecilia Estolano then a City Attorney.) And there’s still some more work to do for BOS to more fully embrace the creek freak environmentalism that I espouse…

I hope that GM Robinson might be doing some similar gradual leadership changes at the DOT… elevating more open and forward-thinking LADOT transportation engineers to positions of prominence. I haven’t seen it yet, but that doesn’t mean that Rita isn’t working on it quietly. (I hope I didn’t blow it by revealing her strategy here.)