2024 40 Under 40: Tamar Fuhrer

As the deputy transportation officer for the city of Culver City, Calif., Tamar Fuhrer is charged with overseeing the city’s Transit Ambassador Program, strategic budgeting and financials and process enhancements for the agency. Fuhrer’s main goal in this position and all throughout her career in transit has been to bring new riders to public transit, improve operations for transit agencies and find innovative ways to advance transportation for the masses.  

Her enthusiasm towards transportation has driven her 16-plus year career in the field. Having the opportunity to do her college and graduate studies in two major metropolises (New York, N.Y., and Toronto, Ontario,), Fuhrer she learned just how important critical transportation was for people to thrive in the cities they lived and worked in. Immediately following graduation, Fuhrer relocated to the Los Angeles, Calif., area and joined a transportation planning and engineering consulting firm, where she had the opportunity to lead and support complex transit projects throughout the southern California region.  

One of her projects was the development of a microsimulation of a new light rail junction to enable the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (L.A. Metro) plan headways for a new line without impacting the existing line sharing the track.  

Continuing her career as a L.A. Metro employee, Fuhrer spent time in the agency's operations and innovation departments, managing several unsolicited proposals, one of L.A. Metro's new initiatives to change the procurement paradigm. Of note, she played a key role in deploying a drone technology pilot program to assess state of good repair of transit facilities while concurrently promoting workforce development opportunities for facilities staff.  

Fuhrer next transitioned to working for a large employer, where she built a bespoke Transportation Demand Management program to increase its green commuting to more than 35 percent of its workforce, leveraging her knowledge of the regional infrastructure and coupling it with her analytical mindset.  

She partnered with L.A. Metro to build the company's vanpool resource within the regional program, establishing one of the highest employee participations regionally while concurrently increasing public transit riderships along the nearby bus and light-rail lines.  

Fuhrer is now in a position that allows her to serve the very community in which she lives. As a Culver City resident, she brings her work home with her - sharing her love of transit with her toddler, who she said adores the Culver City green bus.  

She has been an active member in the industry beyond her role, having served in leadership positions in her local chapters of Women in Transportation Seminar, Association for Commuter Transportation and the American Planning Association.  

Fuhrer has spoken at conferences throughout the industry and takes pride in developing interesting and diverse panel discussions with other transportation leaders. She is incredibly passionate about mentorship and professional development of the next generation of transportation professionals. Outside of her work on major transit project, Fuhrer has been active in mentoring programs, serving as both a mentor and protegee, in addition to taking on informal proteges.  

Is there a specific experience that led you to where you are today?   

I first became interested in working in transportation while earning my master's degree in urban planning, as I found that this specialization had a nice balance of quantitative and qualitative analyses. Everyone experiences transportation (both the good and bad) in their daily lives and factoring in the user experience with data was interesting to me. Each career move that I've made has added a new set of learning experiences - building a program from the ground up, applying a new way of working to reach more stakeholders - and I've been fortunate to get to tailor the knowledge that I've gained from previous experiences into the new role. 

What do you enjoy most about your job?  

Stakeholder engagement. Transportation is so unique because everyone experiences it in their daily lives and it's ever changing. Now working in the city that I live in, I'm both an employee and a daily user of our transportation system so there's even more motivation to serve my community. I also love finding ways to problem solve and find continuous improvement.

What’s the most challenging part of your job?   

There's so much to do and never enough time. I'm grateful to work with a group of smart, thoughtful and innovative colleagues and there's so much excitement of ways that we can advance mobility. While we can accomplish many great things for the city, there's always more we want to do. 

Accomplishment you’re most proud of and why?  

I am so proud of the professionals that I've mentored throughout my career thus far and having maintained relationships with them as they expand in their roles and do amazing things for the transportation world. I have benefited from having amazing mentors - both formally and informally - since I first started working in the industry and paying that forward has always been important to me.

 Fortunately, I have had the opportunity to do so even early in my career, mentoring students and recent grads, who are now growing into leadership roles. It's never too early to contribute to the career development of others and being able to mentor others with career ambitions in the industry is a fantastic way to grow the transportation profession. Being able to evolve the mentor/protege relationship beyond formal programs has enabled me to continue to contribute to their growth and I've also learned so much from those who I mentored.

What is an accomplishment you would like to work towards in your career?  

Transit becoming a top choice for users of all walks of life in the Los Angeles. region. Transit afforded me the opportunity to be more independent as a teen and college/grad student and it's so important for the health of the system (and the environment) for transit to be an attractive choice for all ages and walks of life. The transportation landscape of the region has changed a lot since I've been here and there's still a lot to do. Thinking about how different people move around through the system and being able to create diverse and scalable solutions is both exciting and challenging.