Melanie Crotty and MTC Honored at Women's Transportation Seminar Awards

Former MTC staff member Melanie Crotty received a posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award, and MTC received the chapter’s Employer of the Year award, at the annual awards ceremony held by the Women's Transportation Seminar (WTS) San Francisco Bay Area on May 22, 2018, at the Scottish Rite Center in Oakland.

Melanie Crotty was MTC’s director of operations. She passed away in November 2017 after a long and courageous battle with cancer. In her 25-year career with MTC, Melanie, perhaps more than any other person in the Bay Area transportation community, guided to the shift from simply building infrastructure to managing and operating it for peak efficiency. Melanie helped deliver the Regional Express Lanes Program, Bay Area toll bridge rehabilitation programs, and a range of programs to improve the performance of the freeway and transit network through the introduction and ongoing operations of intelligent transportation system (ITS) technologies. Melanie also helped pioneer the Clipper® smartcard fare payment system for Bay Area transit systems. She served on the Board of Directors for ITS America and ITS California, and on multiple committees of the National Academy of Science’s Transportation Research Board. Melanie received master’s degrees in transportation engineering and city planning from UC Berkeley as well a bachelor’s degree in system engineering from the University of Virginia.

In honoring MTC as its Bay Area chapter’s Employer of the Year, WTS noted that MTC’s mission continues to evolve with the times, with a recent emphasis on syncing transportation investments with housing and development, as reflected in the integration of MTC’s staff with the staff of its sister agency, the Association of Bay Area Governments. Women comprise 54 percent of MTC’s staff and hold 53 percent of the agency’s leadership positions, including representation on the executive management team.

Audrey Cooper, editor-in-chief of The San Francisco Chronicle, was keynote speaker for the night, and other local honorees of the evening included Napa Valley Transportation Authority and employees of SPUR, Fehr & Peers and WSP. Two high school students and four college students also received WTS scholarships to further their studies in transportation-related fields, including former MTC staffer Stella Yip.