The Youth Task Force (YTF) is one of the exciting Safe Routes to Schools programs Transform brings to life. Students from high schools across Alameda County join the YTF to take on the role of leading the Safe Routes program at their individual high schools. Members take part in quarterly meetings where they build community across the county, share ideas, and learn about active transportation and climate advocacy. And, sometimes, our fabulous YTF members go on to do great things and come back to inspire the current cohort. Recently, we were thrilled to have a visit from Liana Tran, a YTF member in the 2021/2022 school year who is now a junior at UC Berkeley.

High school leadership

Liana joined the YTF while she was a student at Livermore High School. As an avid bike rider, she quickly began to discover the need for safer streets. She saw the group as a way to further her interest in bicycle and pedestrian advocacy and environmental issues. She was particularly inspired by the Tactical East Avenue process.

While on the Youth Task Force, Liana hosted encouragement events through the Nature Club, where she advocated for her peers to use active and shared transportation and think about local transportation issues. She originally was interested in environmental science, but during her senior year, she realized she wanted to study civil engineering as a way to advocate for better transportation systems. Through this major, she could create systems that would also benefit our environment. She is now a junior majoring in civil engineering with a minor in city planning and data science at Cal.

Paving the way for the next wave of young leaders

Liana has distinguished herself in college. She’s the president of the Cal Institute of Transportation Engineers, an organization dedicated to students interested in becoming transportation professionals. And she’s still a big transportation advocate.

Earlier this year, Liana reached out to us to see how she could get the Cal ITE organization involved with the Safe Routes to Schools program. One of the ways she has been involved so far is by joining the February meeting of the Youth Task Force, along with her classmate, Jason Tan. At the meeting, the college students spoke about their experiences transitioning from high school to college, the Cal Transportation Competition Team they are part of, and potential careers in the field of transportation.

Liana and Jason described potential college majors in the field: 

• Civil Engineering
  • Main study for students interested in transportation engineering
• Urban Studies/City Planning
  • Main study for students interested in transportation planning
• Data Science
  • Transportation is extremely data-heavy! Data analysis, population studies
• Industrial Engineering
  • Traffic and signal optimization, including transit signal priority
• Linguistics/English
  • Grant writing, proposal writing!

They also outlined potential career paths like traffic and transportation engineering, transportation planning, and rail engineering and planning.

The presentation showed YTF members how they could continue to be involved in the transportation field beyond high school and even make it a career choice. The students were excited and energized by Liana and Jason’s stories and the information they presented. And it was a proud moment for the staff who support the YTF program to see one of our graduates so engaged in the work and becoming a leader in the transportation field. We are looking forward to seeing even more leaders develop through the years.