Get to know Glenn Havinoviski! Glenn is an international expert in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) providing practice leadership, project management and technical expertise. This includes connected and automated vehicles (CAV), active traffic management for freeways and arterials, integrated corridor management (ICM), managed lanes, road pricing, interactive traveler information and mobility services, bus rapid transit (BRT), and related traffic signal priority operations activities. Additionally, he has provided training for the International Road Federation (IRF) and National Highway Institute (NHI). He is a member of TRB's Standing Committee on Transportation Demand Management.

Over the past 37 years Glenn has worked in 18 states, Canada, Mexico, Hungary, Taiwan, UAE, and Saudi Arabia, along with system integrators in Germany and Turkey. In addition to the aforementioned countries, he has also presented at conferences in the Netherlands, Italy, and China. This yielded a lot of unparalleled work experience, appreciation of numerous cuisines, and some really cool photographs, especially the two years he lived in Dubai two blocks from a picturesque beach that offered camel rides.

A former college disk jockey, Glenn is a volunteer for Fairfax Public Access, hosting a weekly show on Radio Fairfax featuring 60 years of both rock and roll, entitled "The Reddy Kilowatt Hour". Finally, Glenn has been active in the Potomac Region of the Porsche Club of America, serving for several years as chair of the Drive and Dine Committee (responsible for driving tours and visits to restaurants/wineries/hotels/museums). He has also served as a race flagger as well as organizer of fundraising charity lap events for the annual Club Race at Summit Point Raceway in nearby West Virginia.

1.What do you do at JMT?

I am leading the firm's national foray into Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), working right now both as a marketing lead and in several instances, as project manager.

2.What brought you to JMT?

I was once again looking for the opportunity to take a firm with some excellent capabilities and resources across multiple offices, and to help bring them together to form a viable advanced ITS and traffic management practice area. I had done it a couple decades earlier with another firm, and there was nothing like the excitement of being able to succeed with that. Early on at JMT, my suspicions were confirmed when we were able to win a major contract and capture some task orders on existing contracts that we hadn't been able to before.

3.What do you like most about JMT?

The employee owners of this firm come first, and we are a part of our communities. The firm is growing nicely but is not a supersize monolith that operates in its own stratosphere. I once heard a client say about those firms, "sometimes I feel like we are working for them and not the other way.”

JMT's culture is attractive both to young engineers as well as experienced managers and staff who have worked in both the public and private sector. Owning a part of the firm gives everyone skin in the game. Respect for staff and their families comes first, but at the same time we look after our clients. It's amazing how well a firm can do when you provide that kind of culture. So many firms have gotten away from that in recent years, but to me, it's why we are here.

4.What type of projects do you like to work on most?

There are many types of projects that I love to work on! What I've brought into the firm is my love of systems engineering and the ability to envision either an entirely new program or project, or, lately, how to modernize or rebuild traffic management systems for a variety of clients. Helping clients and stakeholders understand their goals and objectives, working with them on some different options, and then helping develop system requirements and procurement documents like plans and specifications.

Ultimately, I'd like to see us get further into system integration and testing. We do a lot of work as extensions of agency staff within real-time traffic operations centers, including Syracuse, NY, as well as several tunnels in places like Kentucky and Virginia. I did a lot of on-site operations work much earlier in my career, and I wish more people could have the kind of training I did.

5.What advice do you have for someone who wants to get into this industry / career?

First of all, interning is awesome! I worked for almost three years as a Co-Op student with the Illinois Department of Transportation, working on a variety of things ranging from surveying to drafting to concrete inspection to working in a traffic operations center. It excites me to see how strong our own internship program at JMT is! For you young kids out there, figure out what is your passion. It often evolves with time as you realize what is possible and what you like doing.

I started out at age 15 wanting to be an urban planner, thinking I could develop great cities and suburbs and designing highways and rail transit. Ultimately, you realize that even someone as dominant as Robert Moses or Daniel Burnham (or more recently, Sheikh Mohammed in Dubai) needed many people who could transform their visions (good, bad or just plain wacky) into reality. The beauty of what we do is not just coming up with good ideas, but being able to make them happen and to benefit the communities we are in. It is a different calling than a business or liberal arts degree, and not everyone embraces the engineering mindset. But that mindset is all about solving problems and often requires solving problems that defy the fundamentals you've learned in engineering school.

Engineers, especially in our civil engineering, transportation, environmental and public works professions, have to understand the psychology of working with many stakeholders, and the fiscal limitations our clients often have. That means you or someone else may determine what part of your vision is most important and beneficial, so that can get built first. The "correct" answer is not always "right" answer for a community, which a lot of people whose families might have gotten displaced by a freeway in the 1950s can attest to.

6.What is something new and exciting that you're working on?

Everything I've worked on lately is something new and exciting, certainly for JMT! Two of the projects I've been involved in involve replacing old technologies with the latest technologies, and encompass our philosophy or "One JMT".

In Washington DC (working for DDOT), we helped plan and are now developing a series of procurement documents to replace 40-year traffic signal controller technologies at nearly 1600 intersections with the latest advanced traffic controllers, and we also helped them replace a 30-year-old traffic control system with one that can communicate to both the old and new traffic controllers as they are upgraded. It's a true "One JMT" project as we incorporated both a system-oriented perspective which we carry in the Technology Group with the need for our traffic engineering experts to do some physical design plans at numerous intersections where not only controllers but other equipment such as conduits and cabling will need to be replaced.

In eastern Virginia, we are working with a private concessionaire (Elizabeth River Crossings) who operate two tunnels and a short freeway in Portsmouth and Norfolk, Virginia. We have helped them develop a concept of operations and requirements for replacement of a tunnel traffic management system that is nearing the end of its life cycle, and the end result will be helping the client bring on a single entity to implement, operate and maintain software, tunnel equipment, and traffic devices such as cameras and electronic signing. Again, we've embraced the "One JMT" philosophy, with our Technology Group addressing various technology and procurement issues and several traffic engineers working alongside them.