Whitney Shephard Elected as GPA's Next President

Transport Studio is proud to announce the election of Principal and Co-founder Whitney Shephard as the next President of the Georgia Planning Association. Whitney has served on the GPA Board as District 9 Director since 2014. She founded and currently chairs the GPA Mentor Program. In addition to service to GPA, Whitney also serves as Co-chair of the Savannah Mobility Advisory Committee and as Zoning Subcommittee Chair for the Chatham County Housing Coalition. She was a charter member, and served as Membership Chair, of the Coastal Empire Society of Women Engineers. Whitney serves as Board Secretary of Deep Center. She is also Past President of Metro Savannah Rotary, and a current Area Governor of Rotary District 6920.

How can we help our communities recover?

Like many planners and engineers, we are working to respond to the pandemic, economic crisis, and social movements impacting our daily lives - and our futures. Our profession is set to lead the way as we face recovery, resilience, and equity challenges in our communities. Transport Studio is prepared to support governments, private industry, and nonprofits in collaborative efforts to stabilize and promote our health and economies.

Health in All Policies includes healthy housing, active living, healthy eating, safe streets, and so much more!

Transport Studio promotes healthy communities through public policy and infrastructure investment. Since our inception, we have focused on promoting the common good through data driven recommendations for both public, private, and nonprofit sector clients. Ms. Shephard developed and managed both the statewide Plan4Health initiative and the Healthy Policy for a Healthy Savannah project, facilitating a systematic review of policy and investment to promote healthy, safe, neighborhoods. The Healthy Policy project shaped development and adoption of Savannah's Zoning Ordinance in 2019 as well as transportation investments. County-wide recommendations spanned policy areas from access management and mobility to housing development standards. Dr. Meyer is lead author of Transportation and Public Health: An Integrated Approach to Policy, Planning, and Implementation, released last year; the book is a guide for integrating public health (including pandemics) into transportation planning and implementation.

We provide grant writing and research services to public agencies and nonprofits working across our service lines in mobility and transportation, healthy food access, land use and housing policy.

Our team is focused on resilience and climate change adaptation planning. We were proud to partner with the Atlanta Regional Commission and Atkins on the Atlanta Region Resilience Study. We developed an interactive survey that gathers location data and user-defined characteristics of extreme weather impacts. Dr. Meyer serves as Principal Researcher on several resilience projects including the Transportation Research Board’s NCHRP 20-117 Deploying Transportation Resilience Practices in State DOTs and NCFRP 50 Freight Transportation Resilience in Response to Supply Chain Disruptions.

Transport Studio manages diverse advocacy campaigns connecting public policy, plans, and investments to equity, quality of life, and public health outcomes.

Through extensive training and collaboration with underserved communities, we've dedicated ourselves to promoting equity in access to services and opportunity. Everyone deserves a chance to make a healthy choice through active transportation, healthy food, and community-building.

Jeanine Roach Joins Transport Studio

Ms. Jeanine Backman Roach has over 30 years of experience in diverse GIS projects concentrated in Engineering and Environmental Geography, specializing in Coastal Environments. Jeanine is a certified GISP (2008) and she was one the first Geoscientists to attain South Carolina’s Professional Land Survey licenses for GIS (2002). Jeanine has worked in both the public and private sectors.  Her expertise includes GIS project management, database design, data analysis and metrics, and GIS applications. Jeanine has worked with the Transport Studio team since 2015, serving a critical role in our Healthy Policy for a Healthy Savannah project along with the Ogeechee Riverkeeper project we will highlight soon. We are thrilled to take this next step with her.