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Eva Lerner-Lam isn't afraid to tell what kind of ride the ITS and security industry is in for over the next few years. And I'm assuming she was just as direct with her customers during the days she helped run some of her father's Honda dealerships in the mid-1980s.

As my questions turned more specific during our interview on the eve of the second anniversary of 9/11, the founder and president of Palisades Group USA seemed increasingly determined to lay out the truth about her field and its future.

But aside from the stint as a car dealer, Lerner-Lam hasn't taken a whole lot of test drives in terms of her career path. She felt her passion for transporting goods and people from point A to point B at an early age, and the trip is far from over.

TM+E: When did you know you wanted to pursue a career in transportation?

Lerner-Lam: I remember it distinctly. It was a day in October sitting in a course that I was auditing in Princeton called "Introduction to Urban Transportation." The professor got up and drew two points on the board, point A to point B, and he drew a series of links connecting them. Then he drew a second series of links that looked longer and more complicated to get to point B. He put some values on each of the links, and if you added up the impedance values of the two sets of links, the one that looked shorter actually calculated a higher quantitative number than the one that looked longer. And so the right answer was that you should go on the route that looked longer but calculated lower. That image and his particular style of teaching it is what gets me up in the morning, and has for 29 years.

TM+E: What was your first job out of college?

L-L: I was an intern at the county of San Diego Integrated Planning Office and I coded those links. There was a mainframe computer at Caltrans Division 11 and we were doing the network. I was in the planning department but was coding in the transportation link values. I couldn't believe it when they assigned me the job. I said, "Do you know what got me interested in transportation in the first place?" So I coded the links. This was 1977 so there was nothing digitized at the time. I was hard coding in values for four-digit links. I would drop off these sheets and sheets of manually entered link values over at Caltrans. They would enter it onto punch cards. It would take a week turnaround to get a printout and then I would sit and edit it two days for errors.

TM+E: You left your dream career to take care of your father and his business. Tell us about this turning point in your life.

L-L: My father had recovered from a heart attack but he was weak.

His business, he was the president of an import/export company that was based in Hong Kong, and the company got a deal in 1976 with some Japanese automobile retailers and it led to the first Honda dealership in America. My dad opened the first Honda dealership in America in 1977. In 1984 (after the heart attack) my father asked me if I could join him to help him out, to be his eyes and ears. As it turned out he gained strength quicker than what his doctors thought and I was able to accompany him, so I learned a tremendous amount about being a person, about business the right way, I learned all of that stuff from him.

TM+E: So how did you step back into the transportation industry?

L-L: I got a call from the people who were trying to build the light-rail system in Jersey City. They called me and asked me if I was available to join the staff. They asked if they could hire me on-call to help them through the Environmental Impact Statement. I did two of them in San Diego for their light-rail systems so that's mainly why they wanted me. So I went and filed a corporate name locally.

They were in the throes of trying to get the contract issued when I got a call from the governor's office. The commissioner of transportation had heard from one of my colleagues on the Princeton board that my dad had passed and that I was available for "volunteer" work for his transportation program in New Jersey. This was literally out of the blue, but I said yes.

TM+E: Your company (Palisades Group USA) is based in New Jersey and saw the full effect of 9/11. In your opinion, how did the transit industry respond on that disastrous day?

L-L: Transit has always had to deal with terrorism of one sort or another, whether it's political or just disgruntled employees.

Security, from the perspective of whether it's a guy with a political agenda or a guy whose wife just left him and he's on drugs, has always been a high priority for transit. So transit ratcheted itself up and needed to figure out how everybody else was trying to make some sense and order out of security issues.

Transit already had a tremendous amount of the infrastructure in place. For example, right out of the box out of 9/11 the transit industry immediately organized a series of "Community Connection" seminars. Immediately I think there were over 20 of these meetings. They got people together and decided they needed two more colors (in addition to the ones used in the Department of Homeland Security's terror alert system). That's a demonstration of how well the transit industry really did have things in place.

This is not to say that we weren't caught by surprise in a lot of other different ways. I think that many transit agencies were caught by surprise that their fellow first responders expected them to be an integral part of evacuation. Many transit agencies have evacuation plans in the books, but I think the concept of when the nation is under attack, what rules are in place? They addressed that immediately.

TM+E: What were the two new colors established in transit's terror alert system?

L-L: Purple and black. Black means that the agency is in an area where it is also under attack. Purple is a condition where the area that the agency serves is in recovery mode, but not back to business as usual. The industry already had these colors in place in regions where there are hurricanes, earthquakes and heavy snowstorms. What they didn't have were the five colors below (used by the Department of Homeland Security).

A lot of people laughed at the Homeland Security warning system. I personally feel it's the absolute appropriate thing for the federal government to come up with and to go any deeper than five colors would be going beyond its mandate. Every domain needs to specify what it needs to do under those five categories. The seven colors are posted at the FTA website, as well as what the transit agencies are supposed to do (at a specific terror alert stage).

TM+E: So it's been almost two years to the day since terrorists struck this country. Even though a lot was already in place, what improvements have been made in the industry?

L-L: There are two areas where there has been great improvement. One is the ability to communicate with their customers in a more open way about security than before. Now they can say, "If you see suspicious behavior, here's an 800-number you can call." They couldn't do that before because people didn't want to think about it. Now they can, and that greatly enhances an agency's ability to prevent a terrorist attack.

The other major advance since 9/11 is other organizations' willingness to work with transit on security. Before when transit agencies wanted to do drills for emergencies they could not get the attention of the other emergency first responding personnel. The cooperation of the others is the biggest advance.

TM+E: You mention there hasn't been a whole lot of advances in technology. Do you see in the future technology, in particular ITS, playing a huge role in security?

L-L: That is the challenge for this society. ITS will only work if data flows. And data does not flow unless there are standard interfaces between the devices. Until the vendors and the buyers of equipment can get the wherewithal to seriously develop the standards and develop tests, maintain and train-in-the-use-of standards ITS will never be able to work for security or for anything else. The data standards . . . we've made a lot of progress but we're not there yet.

A lot of people like to make analogies between stereo components and ITS. You need standards to be able to plug and play a stereo receiver into an amplifier. But you actually need hundreds of standards. You need data standards so the bits flow accurately, you need plug standards, you need equipment standards. You need many standards to make the stereo system actually work.

In the transit industry we have very few vendors and we have very few standards. We have standardized the data definitions for all of transit . . . what we don't have are some key ones. In order for ITS to work for security we need to get those key ones, and we need cooperation from vendors and we need the backbone of the agencies. The agencies must specify standards in their procurement documents. They must specify that the data that comes out of this system they're about to purchase must be able to flow to that system they purchased last year. This way they will know which bus driver was driving which bus that was bombed at which intersection and how many passengers were on the bus at the time. Unless that data flows ITS will be useless to the industry.

TM+E: This summer the East Coast suffered one of the worst power outages on record. Do you think ITS should be playing a bigger role in cities like New York when it comes to evacuating the masses?

L-L: I think there is a lot that's about to come on line in ITS. Ed Mark of the New York State DOT is leading a national effort to standardize the communications for incident management and it's almost all web-based. They're setting up 53 hot spots for wireless communications for emergency personnel in New York City.

A lot of things are just about to happen, but again the data is not going to flow among the most important applications.

TM+E: In terms of funding, what do you think is needed for ITS and security for this country to take a step forward?

L-L: I think the budget condition is actually much worse than you can actually read from the newspapers. I think it is very serious. If you take a look at savings rates and loss of tax revenues at the local, state and federal level I think we are in much worse shape than we would like to believe from a budget standpoint. I think we're in a long period of budget duress.

I think we've only begun extreme budgeting. We are going to be cutting in places where we can't even think of cutting. In two years, three years we will be cutting things that we really think is bone marrow. In that context, where would I put my money? I would put my money in the human things like the drills and I would put my money in the standard. It's too early to buy the devices. Don't buy the devices, because they aren't going to be able to talk to each other.

Three to five years from now we are going to be fighting cyber terrorism. Cyber terrorism has major impacts on transit.

A cyber terrorist can shut down the New York City subway if he wants to. We need to transfer data amongst secured participants and we need to secure that data from the people we don't want to have that data.          TME