- Alma Mater: University of Minnesota
- Favorite hobby(s): "Spending time with my family and travelling."
Mona Elabbady, SRF Consulting Group’s transit planning principal is a respected transit industry leader. She has built an admirable career and has cultivated service excellence and career enjoyment among her SRF team and many up-and-coming transit professionals.
Central to Elabbady's success is outstanding listening and communication. She listens to her clients, her staff, and to her colleagues. She anticipates issues and addresses them head on. The result is well-managed projects, happy staff, inspired colleagues, and her well-deserved reputation as a respected transit leader in the Twin Cities and, increasingly, across the country.
Elabbady is known as a skilled project manager, having proven capable of overseeing multiple high-profile, politically-charged projects concurrently. Her teams deliver quality and innovative products, and she has never had budget overrun in her career. Elabbady has been involved in nearly every major transit project in the Twin Cities. A few of her notable projects include many phases of Metro Transit's Green Line, a light rail line connecting downtown Minneapolis, downtown St. Paul, and the University of Minnesota; planning and design for the Orange Line bus rapid transit project connecting Minneapolis to its southern suburbs; the award-winning Twin Cities Arterial Transitway Corridor Study; and transit planning for the Rochester Destination Medical Center. Currently, Elabbady is leading environmental documentation for BRT projects in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Elabbady’s keen business sense, deep understanding of transit planning best practice, and industry relationships have promoted the success of SRF’s transit practice; tripling the size of the group in her tenure at SRF. Elabbady’s skills and contributions are held in high esteem by leadership and her peers at SRF; she holds one of two peer-elected seats on the company’s board of directors.
Elabbady leads a team of planners at SRF that deliver projects in both rural and urban areas. She empowers her employees to develop relationships with clients and demonstrates good management by example. Elabbady coaches staff not just on technical content, but, more difficultly, on how to manage people and projects; she is a terrific advocate for her staff and works hard to match people with work that excites and inspires them. Elabbady has extended this attention to other fortunate young professionals as a mentor to aspiring transportation and planning professionals as part of the WTS Transportation You and the Urban Land Institute mentor programs, as well as in the mentor program at SRF.
"What I enjoy the most about my job is working with incredible people who really care about making an impact in their communities. From my clients to my coworkers at SRF, I am surrounded by people who believe in the importance of high quality transit and know the impact it has on a person’s daily life. I also love the diversity of people, projects and cities that transit allows me to interact with."
