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'Sometimes, looking back on my long career, I wonder how I pulled it off," reflects Kay Van Sickel, the recently appointed director of the transportation business group at Otak, Inc (Lake Oswego, OR). "At the time, you don't realize you're doing it."
Van Sickel has a wealth of experience with both public agencies and private consulting companies. Before her present appointment, she was a regional director with the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) in Region 1, the Portland area and surrounding counties.
Otak has been providing design and engineering services for public and private developments for more than twenty years. With some 300 employees in Oregon, Washington, Arizona and Colorado, it works in all kinds of transportation, residential projects, public works, city and regional planning and more. Right now it's Oregon's contractor to redesign and rebuild several of the state's bridges.
DOT work
Van Sickel manages eighteen people in a group that specializes in state DOT work. She joined Otak in 2003, after the Oregon legislature approved funding to replace deteriorating bridges. Why? "I knew that an Oregon-based company would have an advantage in getting the contract, and I suspected it would be Otak because of its comprehensive culture," she explains.
"It's a true combination of architecture and engineering. This is an excellent fit for me," she says.
Watching the trains
Van Sickel developed an early interest in transportation by watching trains with her father in their hometown of Clovis, NM, a rail center near the Texas border. Her family's long history in the area began when her grandparents on both sides settled there in the early 1900's, before it was a state.
She has a BA in geography and American history from Eastern New Mexico University (Portales, NM). Her interest in cartography led to a job with the St. Louis, MO, office of the U.S. Air Force mapping agency.
But security mapping in the Cold War era wasn't a comfortable fit for her. When she heard that New Mexico's DOT was starting a photogrammetry unit in its highway department, she applied for a job there and got one.
Mapping in NM and TX
Before the advent of computers, photogrammetry based on aerial photos was the best way to track highway department supplies like huge stockpiles of gravel and sand, and was a way to map areas under consideration for future highway developments.
After six years, Van Sickel had advanced as far as she could with the New Mexico DOT. She took a job with the Texas DOT, which offered to sponsor her for further education.
When she got to Texas, she found the DOT there was entering the computer age. She studied Cobol and Fortran at night, after a day spent with a group creating a computerized mapping system. What she learned then, she says, "really helped me understand GIS when it came along."
Her work impressed the Texas DOT, and the department sponsored her for a Federal Highway Admin fellowship at the University of Tennessee, a top school for transportation at the time.
She studied, worked in the school's transportation research center, and completed an MA in transportation and urban planning in 1977.
Work in the Southeast
Armed with the new degree, she found a job with civil engineers Hensley Schmidt, then headquartered in Chattanooga, TN. She was hired to head up long-range transportation planning in the company's new Jackson, MS office.
She created a plan for the Jackson, MS Metropolitan Planning Organization and took on a variety of other transportation projects.
"Looking back, it probably was the best experience I ever had," she says. "I learned to work for all types of local agencies, from small communities in Mississippi to larger projects throughout the Southeast."
She got into many kinds of transportation and learned the needs of every kind and size of community. Not many transportation planners, and almost no woman, had that breadth of experience. "As a consultant, I did almost everything," she says.
Off to California
After seven years in Mississippi, Van Sickel was eager to return to the West. She found a job with the Orange County Transportation Authority (Santa Ana, CA). "I was a natural fit for it," she says.
Her first job was a challenge: work on high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes on two major freeways. The lanes had to connect the freeways and provide direct access to a huge business and residential plaza.
From there, she went on to seventeen successful years in Southern California, the area that has become the poster child for high-traffic management. She was even doing preliminary work on a light rail system for the area when a change in political climate forced local agencies to retrench.
She moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, working as assistant general manager for the well-established AC Transit which serves Contra Costa and Alameda Counties. Sharon Banks, the general manager at AC Transit, was the agency's first woman GM. Working for Banks gave Van Sickel both challenges and innovative management opportunities.
Using all her talents
Van Sickel had long thought of the Portland, OR region as a model of transportation innovation. In 1997 a position opened up with ODOT. "For the first time in my career, I could use all my talents in one job," she says.
She was an ODOT regional director, the first woman and first non-engineer to hold such a post. Her acceptance was a big change from early years, she notes with a laugh. Working in photogrammetry in the 1960s, she was not only not allowed to go up in the mapping plane, but couldn't even drive a car on the job.
Attitudes have changed. Now women are welcomed and encouraged in transportation planning, she says.
Van Sickel is a member of the Women's Transportation Seminar, the Institute of Transportation Engineers, and several professional planning organizations.
The pace is different
Leading Otak's rapidly growing transportation business group, Van Sickel is happy to mentor other women entering the company. Otak encourages women in technical roles and supports them on their career paths, she notes. And as a transportation guru and one of the first women in the field, she finds herself answering plenty of questions from the new women techies.
Now at the peak of her career, Van Sickel has successfully worked across political divisions of state and local agencies, and dealt with the uncertainties of public funding and the private economic picture.
Government agencies require more meetings, she notes with a laugh. But consulting implies heightened expectations for producing results.
"The pace is different. It's a different kind of work," she says. Turns out she loves them both.
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