Oakland’s Transportation Department is getting a new director starting in April, and he is coming all the way from Atlanta.
Last Friday, City Administrator Jestin Johnson announced Josh Rowan, the first director for the Atlanta Department of Transportation, will take over as OakDOT’s director in mid-April.
Rowan, a 50-year-old native of Texas, led several big initiatives during his two-plus years in charge of Atlanta’s roads, including getting a $30 million federal Safe Streets for All grant that helped transform two of that city’s most dangerous roads. The project added new bike lanes and flashing beacons to warn drivers of crossing pedestrians, similar to infrastructure that’s been added to busy Oakland streets like Broadway and Bancroft Avenue.
A press release announcing Rowan’s hiring highlights his work reducing street racing and sideshows, facilitating right-of-way signaling for emergency vehicles, and helping develop the 2022 Move Atlanta Forward ballot measures, which raised nearly $200 million for building sidewalks and trails and about $100 million for safe streets projects over five years.
Some Atlanta residents criticized Rowan for, in their opinion, not focusing as much as they would have liked on improving bike and pedestrian infrastructure, and for living outside the city. (Rowan was a Smyrna, GA resident.)
In a city press release announcing his hiring, Rowan said safety will be his focus. “Safety is our business. Everyone should be able to move freely and safely throughout Oakland using their desired mode of transportation, no matter where they live.”
Members of Oakland’s road safety advocacy community welcomed the news of his hiring.
“I look forward to this former Atlanta DOT director bringing fresh ideas and energy to solving longstanding capacity issues in the department,” said Robert Prinz, advocacy head of Bike East Bay, one of the region’s most influential safe streets organizations.
Prinz pointed to an interview Rowan conducted with the Traffic Technology International publication three years ago, where he advocated for work-from-home policies to reduce car use and pollution, as a positive sign of his priorities.
“I think the days of widening the roads and making more lanes because that fights congestion—we know that doesn’t work, and we have to look curb to curb at every lane and see how do we get the highest usage out of it,” Rowan told the publication.
According to his resume, Rowan has a Bachelor’s degree in natural science from Covenant College and a bachelor’s in civil engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Rowan also played basketball for Covenant.
Rowan began his career as a principal engineer at Jacobs Solutions, a global engineering firm. He became an executive at the engineering and construction firm McDonough Bolyard Peck.
In 2019, then-Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance-Bottoms chose Rowan to lead the city’s new department of transportation after he served as general manager of the Renew Atlanta bond program that raised $250 million for infrastructure in 2015. Like OakDOT during its inception in 2015-16, Atlanta’s Transportation Department took over road infrastructure management from the city’s Public Works Department. Also like Oakland, Atlanta created its new transportation department under the guidance of Bloomberg Associates, a consulting firm founded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
The last 24 months have been a busy and challenging time for Rowan. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he unexpectedly resigned as the Atlanta transportation director in 2022 without offering a public explanation, and no explanation of that departure has been given since. A few months later, he resurfaced as the deputy director of the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, commonly known as MARTA, a transit agency that runs buses and trains in the Atlanta region. But Rowan was fired in January 2023, an action he later claimed was without cause, leading him to pursue a lawsuit against the agency this year under the Georgia Whistleblowers Act.
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, after he was fired from MARTA, Rowan posted on LinkedIn that he believed the transit agency was a billion dollars short in sales tax revenue and that it had a $160 million “shortfall” for several big construction project budgets, including the expansion of rail lines and bus-rapid-transit lanes.
In his lawsuit against MARTA, Rowan claims that he found a $6 million difference between two sets of records at MARTA and that an engineering company overcharged the agency for services.
Among the projects Rowan is expected to take on in Oakland soon, either through OakDOT or through the department’s partnerships, are the redesigns of San Pablo Avenue and 73rd Avenue. He’ll also be in charge of efforts to slow down traffic across the city and reduce traffic violence deaths through road repairs. Key to all of this is improving the city’s track record of grant applications for planning and construction funds, and finding ways to avoid painful budget cuts in his department despite Oakland’s looming $177 million deficit.
Rowan is taking over for interim Director Megan Wier, who oversaw the department after Fred Kelley. Kelley has begun his role as the new director of the Parks, Recreation, & Youth Development Department.
