Britt Tanner, P.E.
Senior Engineer
San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency
- Alma Mater: UW-Madison and UC Berkeley
- Favorite TV Show: "West Wing"
- Favorite hobby: Being outdoors with her two kids
- Favorite Transit System (outside of the one they work for) and why: Honolulu’s bus system, because she used it as a latch-key kid in elementary school and it got her everywhere she needed to go. And, it’s called “The Bus,” which she thinks is a great name.
Britt Tanner is passionate about designing streets for transit and has developed a team of young engineers and planners that are transforming San Francisco. She started at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (MTA) as an engineering intern while a grad student at UC Berkeley and risen through the ranks to senior engineer.
In 2008, she started a group, transit engineering, with the sole purpose was to make traffic engineering and transit work better. What started out with five people has now grown to a team of more than 25 engineers and planners working throughout the city implementing the Muni Forward projects, which consist of capital projects to improve San Francisco for transit riders, pedestrians, cyclists and other roadway users.
Tanner has focused on the conceptual design, outreach, legislation and environmental review of projects, while others on the team lead approved projects through construction. She was the lead traffic engineer on the development of the SFMTA’s Transit Effectiveness Project (TEP), which included many corridor projects that are now being implemented through the Muni Forward program.
One project on Haight Street, her team worked with the community to remove 14 parking spaces and are now saving buses that carry 20,000 passengers a day, 2 to 3 minutes each trip. She also served as the project manager for the Better Market Street and Geary Bus Rapid Transit projects.
Tanner also serves as a mentor through the WTS, is on the steering committee developing the NACTO Transit Streets Design guide, and serves as the vice-chair of the Parks and Recreation Commission of Albany.
“Even though each little change we do only saves a few seconds, we’re working citywide. We make a couple dozen changes on a single bus route, and we’ve saved a couple minutes. When you add that up across the thousands of riders each day, that’s thousands of hours you’ve saved – more time for people to do other things, more people riding transit because it’s faster and more reliable, and money saved for the transit agency.”
Tanner intended on being a planning professor until she interned in the planning group in San Francisco’s traffic engineering department.
